Following the "Open by Design" philosophy, NX provides a comprehensive set of toolkits that allow you to capture and preserve domain knowledge over the lifetime of a product. Open automation provides the ability to offer flexible solutions to capture workflow knowledge, automate, and customize a user's interaction with the NX environment. UGS is committed to providing solutions that work well in heterogeneous networked environments, and endeavors to support a wide range of languages, platforms, and new technologies as they emerge. Ranging from simple customization utilities to advanced programming toolkits, the NX Open suite of products provides an extensive and flexible environment for automating and customizing NX.

NX Open is a collection of Application Programming Interface (API) toolkits that allow for the flexible integration of ancillary software applications with NX through an open architecture. The intent for the integrated applications, along with third party and NX applications such as Knowledge Fusion, is to share data:

• Amongst NX Products such as Knowledge Fusion, Teamcenter Engineering, and so on.

• Between different computer platforms

• From different locations (heterogeneous network)

• Across the Internet

NX Open Toolkits are available in the following automation languages:

• C/C++

• .NET

• JAVA

• GRIP

Please refer to the documentation of NX Open for further details of these languages.

When programming in Knowledge Fusion there might be several reasons why users want the ability to access traditional NX Open automation languages.

• Specific API coverage for functionality which is not supported through Knowledge Fusion system classes, methods, and functions.

• Computional intensive operations which need the performance of traditional programming languages like C++

• Drive Knowledge Fusion applications through customized graphical user-interfaces designed in JAVA Swing, MFC, Winforms, and so on.

• Any other operation that you cannot easily achieve through the Knowledge Fusion toolkit

Alternately, you can manipulate Knowledge Fusion rules through automation applications that are written in languages such as C/C++, JAVA and .NET as well.