If it were up to me I'd eliminant Layers altogether, PERIOD! It's an anachronism left over from the days when the 'D' in CAD stood almost exclusively for 'Drafting'.
Now don't get me wrong, I agree that we need some sort of 'collector' mechanism in NX, but trust me, if I were designing it from scratch a fixed number of mutually-exclusive 'buckets' would be the last thing I would propose. I would rather see us rework 'Groups' into a more universal scheme where the user could control the behavior of these allowing more flexibility and being usable across the entire product in a consistent easy to understand manner. And yea, we could have 256 predefined 'groups' named 1 thru 256 for those people who have been using groups extensively and would like to at least retain what they have before they started to move out to something more usable.
John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Design Solutions
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Why? Layer categories have more power than just naming a single layer. So what if the layers are numbers instead of names, you get used to the format. Layer categories add more flexibility because you can change multiple layers with a single word (category name). Also, you can have multiple categories assigned to a single layer.
My guess is that you are new to NX having come from some other CAD system. Tell us more about why you think the NX layering functionality should be changed and what benefit you see from the change.
For reference I have used UGII/NX from 1987(UG2 ver3) to 2010(NX4) and Pro/Engineer since 2001(2000i2) upto now(WF4).
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