Adding to the Toolbox

If you work for a large organization adding a command to the Toolbox could become burdensome. You wouldn’t want to have to open each machine and manually add a command to the Toolbox. Fortunately the developers of Civil 3D have made it easy to add items to the Toolbox using an XML file.

If you go to C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\C3D 2011\enu\Data\Toolbox you will find the default location where the Toolbox configuration files are found. The main file is the ToolBoxCfg.xml file. This is the one that gets installed with Civil 3D. If you installed some of the country kits you will also find the ToolBoxCfg_ files. To create my tool category I copied one of the existing files and then modified it using XML Notepad. You can also create the XML file and then go into Civil 3D and use the Toolbox Editor to add tools or categories.

Now create a script to copy the XML to the appropriate computers and location. Civil 3D will recognize the file and automatically add it to the Toolbox.

Don’t have any commands to go into the Toolbox? Well you might want to create some to make yourself more productive. Or I’d be happy to create a tool or two for your organization to make you and your company more productive.