Lock down Tool Palettes, prevent users from creating / modifying them

[CADdancer]

Hello AUGI Members,

I would like to know if there is a way to "Lock Down" the tool plaettes in an AutoCAD session. I would like to have a standard set of palettes and not allow users to have the capability to create new tool palettes or tools.

Is this possible....???

Any assistance would be appreciated...!

Regards,
Vince

[CADDmanVA]

..."Lock Down" the tool plaettes in an AutoCAD session. I would like to have a standard set of palettes and not allow users to have the capability to create new tool palettes or tools....

Well, for AutoCAD 2006+ set the system variable LOCKUI to 15 to pin down everything.

As for standardized pallets, try looking into Enterprise CUI maybe? I don't use pallets myself often, but it seems that could be an answer.

[Mlabell]

It is as easy as setting the attributes of your standard palette folder to read only, and then assigning a password via windows explorer.

[CADdancer]

Thank you for your quick response.

We have placed our standard tool palettes in a folder that has read only rights and they are protected. What I want to find out is can we prevent the user from setting another path location for tool palettes and then creating individual sets of tool palettes for themselves.

This would be helpful....!

Regards,
Vince

[jpaulsen]

I set two tool palette paths in the Options. One points to a read-only network drive where I keep all the company standard palettes. The other points to a user specific folder.

When a user creates a new palette it is automatically created in the user's folder.

[CADdancer]

jpaulsen,

Thank you for the information, but that is what I want to try to eliminate. Our company does not want users creating tool palettes in their user folders. How can we prevent this from happening...?? Also, is there a way under the "options" command to make the "add" a new path option for tool palettes inactive....?? We do not want users creating individual tool palettes. We want them to use the tool palettes the company provides and we are very responsive to add new palettes and tools to meet their requirements globally. This way everything would be standardized for the entire company.

Regards,
Vince

[jpaulsen]

Your second post got there while I was writing mine =)

Sorry I do not know any way to prevent a user from changing the settings in options.

My office is just the opposite of yours. We encourage people to make their own palettes. Each user has different needs. We have found that having the ability to quickly create a palette of commonly used commands makes them more productive.

[jpaulsen]

I was thinking maybe you can do some thing with VBA or Vlisp. I use a VBA program to set all of our paths in the options. One of them is the tool palette path. Maybe you could set that path every time a drawing is opened. This would not prevent them from adding the path in each drawing session but maybe it would make it inconvenient enough they would stop trying.

Here is the few lines of code I use to set the tool palette path:

 
Set acadPrefFile = ThisDrawing.Application.Preferences.Files
acadPrefFile.ToolPalettePath = "Z:Land DesktopJRToolPalette;Z:Land DesktopLDTToolPalette;U:Land Desktop 2007ToolPalette"

Some one else wrote the VBA program for our company. I have just been maintaining it over the years so I probably can't help you with any details of VBA.

[Mlabell]

Since the toolpalettepath variable is stored in the registry there has to be some way to password protect the registry values... At least I would think there would be. Here is where it is located. HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Autodesk\AutoCAD\"version used"\Profiles\General... Then look for the toolpalettepath variable.