I have used Visio’s Shape.BoundingBox(…) for many, many years and I cannot ever recall it failing, but I have now managed to create some shapes that cause it to error. This caused many hours of confusion, so I nearly abandoned using the method, until I discussed it with my fellow Visio MVP, John Goldsmith (see VisualSignals), and together we examined the cause. It came down to a badly formed sub-shape within the shape that had zero dimension … and in fact had an incomplete ShapeSheet. If you look at the screenshot below, then you may notice that there is no Shape Transform section! That is a mandatory section, and should always exist … so how did this happen?
A colleague\client on one of my projects designs hundreds of shapes in Visio which I save into Xml files so that they can be maintained, searched and re-called easily within the VSTO add-in. Some of these shapes are saved as SVG using the Shape.Export() method, then the SVG text is saved into the Xml. A single master shape is dropped, and the contents updated from the SVG in the Xml. Later, the Shape.Import(…) method is used add the SVG graphics to an existing shape after the SVG text has been extracted from the XML file.
The following screenshot is of the ShapeSheet of the hidden sub-shape in the simple square shape, and of the exported SVG, where it can be seen that the group shape with the id=”shape111713-2” does not have any geometry, thus resulting in the malformed ShapeSheet above.:
Of course, I have asked why those hidden shapes exist in the first place, but my work-around is to automatically remove these error causing sub-shapes after the SVG has been imported:
public static void TraverseAndRemoveEmptySubShapes(Visio.Shape shape)
{
//return;
if (shape == null || shape.Shapes.Count == 0)
return;
foreach (Visio.Shape subShape in shape.Shapes)
{
if (subShape.RowExists[(short)Visio.VisSectionIndices.visSectionObject, (short)Visio.VisRowIndices.visRowXFormOut, (short)Visio.VisExistsFlags.visExistsAnywhere] == 0)
{
subShape.Delete();
}
else
{
// Recursively traverse its sub-shapes
TraverseAndRemoveEmptySubShapes(subShape);
}
}
}It would be good if Visio automatically inserted the mandatory sections from the SVG so the problem did not arise in the first place. I do know of at least one other project that I have work on where zero size sub-shapes are inserted purposefully. These particular sub-shapes are there to hold data only. Hopefully, they never export to SVG and back into Visio shapes!
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