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mvargas5-Regular Member
5-Regular Member
June 8, 2026
Question

Windchill Workgroup Manager 13.0.1.1 with NX 2312

  • June 8, 2026
  • 2 replies
  • 45 views

I’ve used WWGM with Solidworks 202X for years with no issues.

Recently I’ve been tasked to import a few hundred NX prts into our Windchill “commonspace”.

We are on Windchill 12.X.

After installing NX, I went to WWGM Application Management and added NX 2312.

I see the WWGM tool bar when I launch NX but don’t seem to have a connection to

a new workspace I created for this task.

Some more information. When I start NX (unlike SW with WWGM) it launches WWGM itself.

NX come up and has this message (I click okay with no other choices) “Unable to connect to WWGM. If more than one instance of the authoring application is running, the new one will run disconnected”.

Also in WWGM the bottom message bar states “Failed to set workspace local directory” (strange as it works fine for SW).

Any ideas?

Thank you.

2 replies

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Dave_K12-Amethyst
12-Amethyst
June 10, 2026

Check the custom_dirs.dat file, and make sure WWGM added the line properly, and that the folder it points to exists.  I’ve seen double registration lines, I’ve also seen two strings appended together into an incorrect string.  In another case, the install didn’t create the folder in that path, with the proper files.

 

NX and WWGM not talking, is almost always custom_dirs.dat file related.  Its in the c:\\program files\NXxxxx\ugii\menus folder

    M
    mvargas5-Regular MemberAuthor
    5-Regular Member
    June 11, 2026

    Thank you Dave.

    I looked in that folder and found that the custom_dirs.dat has one line in it. 

    C:\cache\.wf\.cadadapters\x86e_win64\ugnx2312 Opening this up I just found two folders “application” and “startup”.

    Neither looked like a workspace cache. Application just has NX menu bitmaps and startup menu files and some .dll files.

    The interesting thing is that when I use Solidworks the Windchill cache folder is in my Document folder in a folder called PTC Places. Should I point NX to that location as well?

    D
    Dave_K12-Amethyst
    12-Amethyst
    June 11, 2026

    Neither of those are the workspace cache, that is the location for the PTC Windchill toolbar, and the icons displayed on it.  I’m far from an expert, I just know if that directory path is botched, NX and WWGM will not talk to each other, and 99% of the time when this happens, its custom_dirs.dat related, in some way.  We recently went thru some issues with it, which is why it’s fresh in my mind.

     

    Does your company use a separate workspace location for NX and Solidworks files?  We use multiple CAD systems, so each has a separate workspace location, since .prt file extension is common across a couple of them.  Ive seen the env variables that define those get crossed up too, and cause issues.  In one case there was an invisible character at the end of the path, which threw it off.

     

     

    M
    mvargas5-Regular MemberAuthor
    5-Regular Member
    June 11, 2026

    Thanks again Dave. I finally got our CAD IT team to take a look at this for me. I’ll post the fix (hopefully).

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