Application Note: Submenus in the NetSwitcher Tray

Some, usually corporate, users have asked for the ability to organize the locations displayed in the NetSwitcher Tray Application's popup menu into submenus for ease of selection. 

In general, most users have only a few locations that they choose from but some have a very large number and having more than about 20-30 makes picking one difficult.

To ease this situation, a method of organizing into submenus has been developed.  There is not presently a user-interface to build the submenus but it can still be simply done using REGEDIT as shown below:

1) Open REGEDIT and then the NetSwitcher setups key:

2) Note the STRING VALUE here titled "SubMenu".  This tells NetSwitcher that this location, "A001" is to appear in a submenu called "A".  All locations marked with "A" will appear in the same submenu "A".

3) Create a "SubMenu" value for all locations that will appear in a submenu and name the submenus as you wish.  You may have up to 256 different submenus and up to 1024 different locations total.

4) The resultant tray popup will have the following organization:

Note here that "A", "D", "H", "S", and "ZZZ" are submenus, each containing one or more locations.  The non-submenued locations still appear below as then did before.

5) Related to this, a setting titled "UseMinimumContextMenu" in the NetSwII key, will force a minimalist popup for use by organizations or users wishing to limit the choices displayed by the popup to an absolute minimum.  (Generally to prevent inexperienced users from making poor choices.)

Set UseMinimumContextPopup to a DWORD value of 0x00000001 to enable this feature.  A 0x00000000 value or lack of this value will cause the tray to behave in the normal manner.

Results in a popup like: