I have a question for anyone who has experience using a purchased gui template for Crestron.

I'm wondering what you get, and how you get them to be System Builder friendly. I'm comfortable with VT Pro, and making changes to the exisiting Destiny templates, but we're looking at getting one of the nicer looking templates from guifx or whoever. I'm curious how much work it is to make them easily reusable in System Builder, and how much our CAIP would hate us if we wanted him to use them in our more elaborate SIMPL systems he writes.

Thanks

Using them with SIMPL will be much easier than trying to decode the mysteries of the SystemBuilder Templates. Your programmer will just have to match up Join Numbers.

 No and yes. They can all be used with SB but they don't come with all the template data that would help a program auto generate in SB. You can however do all the template data yourself, but you have to figure it out on your own,

Can the templates be modified? For example, if I were to enter in the relevant template data for SB, can I save it for future use? Or are they read only?

Yes. For example. I open the Crestron provided Destiny template in VTPro and Save As a new name, but as a .vtt file and then can change out graphics and have my own template.

In learning how to do this I have probably 4 or 5 different template variations of Destiny for the PTX3 and multiple versions of each variation. I've finally settled on one and am in the process of duplicating the graphics for the other interfaces we use. 

It's not easy and there isn't any real help for doing it. I basically use Destiny b/c most of the template data is done and it has lots of data in place that you can review to learn from in a backwards engineering type sense. 

You can use any template you want in system builder. When you drag devices into the program DO NOT let system builder build any pages for them. You have to go into the properties and make sure the build device pages is not selected. You will also have to do all the programming manually. You have to add the joins manually as well just as if you were using simpl. I do this all the time for budget systems and it works great. When you add a touch panel just import your template into system builder.

Unless you create a template file which has the buttons and template data in place in which case you can let SB build the panel for you and be done with maybe some minor editing. OR at least have the blunt of it done, then uncheck the build pages option and manually develop from there. 

I think Is better when you do some project with templates on VTpro and Simpl Windows, as another Post, SB is a weird WORLD.

This is simply advice for someone who can't program in Simpl. Having said that system builder is not easy to learn. Once "Learned Properly" it can handle some pretty complex programming. Pretty powerful software if used correctly.

As far as i know there are no commercially available System Builder GUI templates.

So anything you buy from guifx,ntdesigns,guiwerx etc wont be "plug n play" "auto generation friendly".

You basically have two options. Both were mentioned above.

Option 1 : Mentioned by Sofa King.

Edit template data. In my opinion (IMO)... by the time you figure out how to edit enough template data to make a GUIFX (for example) template work reliably with System Builder you could have already learned SIMPL.

Option 2 : Mentioned by lites4u.

Just copy/paste your GUIFX (for example) template pages into your System Builder project file. Manually create macros and page flips and assign commands to buttons.

I do this often with theaters/surround systems. Simple 1 room stuff that doesn't warrant using a real programmer. Works very well. Gives you the custom look but keeps programming in System Builder.

Option 3:
Create two templates, one for the Adagios and one based on Sonnex, populate them with your standardized components and user interfaces, and just not link to the pages for the sub systems that are not in the system.
Having a template to start out with for some of the components that requires alot of mysterious page flips to work correctly is a real time saver. The IServer and IDOCK V comes to mind.

That is one of the main goal for us this year, standardizing on all the programming. Starting to rework our modules in SIMPL so they populate the buttons correctly in SB.

I do this also. Any 2way stuff i let SB generate for me then i skin it to match our GUI.