Highlighting dirty text in Visio shapes

I suppose I should explain what I mean by dirty text first 🙂

I often display the value of a Shape Data row in Visio text, but sometimes the solution requires that the value is also editable. This is ok if the client accepts that all editing is done with the Shape Data window or dialog, but not if the user more naturally wants to edit the text in the shape. In my current solution, I want to pass the manually edited text to another process for checking, and then only update the Shape Data row when validated or accepted, before re-setting the text with the inserted field. My first task was to spot with text had been manually overtyped, so I decided that checking the value of a new User-defined Cell, called IsDirty, was best, and then this value can be used to change the color of the text (or it could be the LineColor or FillForegnd) to make this value visible.

When Insert / Field is used in Visio, it creates a Text Fields section which can hold the reference to the inserted field.

If the text is manually overtyped, then the rows in the Text Fields section get deleted.

So, I wanted to highlight when this has happened so it can be handled in code.

First, I added a User.IsDirty row with the formula:

=ISERR(Fields.Value)

This returns False when the Fields.Value cell exists, returns True if it does not. Unfortunately, the User.IsDirty formula is automatically reset to ISERR(REF()) when the text is overtyped because the cell that it referred to is now deleted.

So, the next issue is to display this change in the UI, so I edited the Character.Color formula to change from Black to Red if IsDirty = True:

=GUARD(IF(User.IsDirty,2,0))

Now, I just needed to reset the User.IsDirty formula, so it will work again. Fortunately, the TheText cell in the Events section can react to a change in the text, so the following formula will re-instate the formula in the User.IsDirty cell:

=SETF(GetRef(User.IsDirty),"=ISERR(Fields.Value)")

This is possible because the Fields.Value is text in the above formula, so it will not get replaced with REF() in the SETF(…) formula.

So, I manually insert the Name Shape Data row back into the text, the color will automatically change back to Black.

Of course, the text field code be updated with some code, as follows, using the CALLTHIS(…) function:

The VBA sub-function ensures that the whole body of text is replaced with an inserted field:

Public Sub InsertField(ByVal shp As Visio.Shape, ByVal cellName As String)
Dim UndoScopeID1 As Long
  UndoScopeID1 = Application.BeginUndoScope("Set Text Field")
  Dim vsoChars As Visio.Characters
  Set vsoChars = shp.Characters
  vsoChars.Begin = 0
  vsoChars.End = Len(shp.Characters)
  vsoChars.AddCustomFieldU cellName, visFmtNumGenNoUnits
  Application.EndUndoScope UndoScopeID1, True
End Sub

Note that this solution only works for a single block of text, and not for large amounts of text where there are multiple inserted fields.

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