OK, this is the story ;-)
The idea of setting a 'User Zone' is an old concept that was basically obsoleted back in Unigraphics V16.0 when we introduced, for all intents and purposes, the Assembly Navigator that you see today. Note that there was no Resource Bar back then so it couldn't be docked like today, but the basic appearance and behavior have not changed all that much in the past 9 years or so (of course a lot of new stuff has been added). With this new and improved Navigator also came the concept of 'Filters' and 'Component Sets' which went beyond what you could do with 'Zones' alone and while we still support Zones today, we no longer felt that the concept of a 'User Zone' was needed. BTW, a 'User Zone' is sort of like the 'Work Layer' where whatever you create next is added to that Layer, or in this case, to that 'Zone'.
Anyway, like so many other things in UG/NX, when we obsolete something, we don't actually remove the code behind these 'features', we just hide it so that new users aren't distracted and therefore use the new facilities. However, because we know that there will always be 'legacy' users who could have a need to continue to access the older tools, we create a 'switch' (environment variable) which will turn it back on. Well, we documented this variable for a couple of years in the release notes and such, but after awhile we dropped any mention of it as it became even more obsolete and out-of-date, however not all references to the old behavior and options have been removed from the user documentation (but we really should do that sometime), which is why you came across that mention of a command named "Set User Zone".
So, that's the story and I'm sticking to it. Note that I can't really take the credit for passing this information alone to you since someone else who's part of our Assembly group actually put me onto this (he lurks on this message board but doesn't post) so really he deserves the credit for recognizing what it was that you were talking about and telling me where I could learn more about it.
Of course that leaves us with the question, do you really think you need to be able to do this, and if so, do you want the variable? Now I've been told that there's no known risks in using the ONE extra option, 'Set User Zone', that this switch enables, but that since it's technically no longer supported (I think 9 years of obsolescence has earned us some relief in this area) there is the risk that no one is probably going to be able to answer any questions or provide any examples, and of course, if during the course of you using this, it does prove to not be working as expected, there is no chance in 'h***' that we will ever fix it.
So, do you still want to give this a try?
John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
NX Design
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Cypress, CA
To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
