I was persuaded to have a week’s holiday in Taba, Egypt which is on the Red Sea, just south of Eilat in Israel. Well, there are just a handful of hotels on a man-made plateau into the Red Sea at the foot of the mountains in Sinai. Relaxed armed guards were at every checkpoint, and there wasn’t much nightlife, but as sunny break in October it was perfect. Days were spent on the sun-loungers reading novels, or walking out to the coral with snorkel masks to watch the beautiful marine life.
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In my previous post, I began to explore the new Validation objects in the Visio 2010 Technical Preview, an I used some VBA code to do this. Well, I have now uploaded the code to OneDrive ( bVisualValidationExplorer.vss ), so that you can use it too! So, this post is about using this code …
First, download the stencil and save it to you My Shapes folder (if you trust me). This will make it available to you to use in any Visio 2010 document.
Then, whenever you want to use the code, simply open the stencil from the More Shapes / My Shapes category….
The stencil will be docked with the other shape stencils, but, of course, this stencil does not have any shapes … only VBA code.
The Microsoft Visio team recently blogged about Creating custom validation rules for Visio 2010 , in which it was suggested that we can use Visual Basic for Applications to interact with the new validation API. I thought, there’s a challenge … so I will develop a VBA project to do just that. I will upload the code soon, but, as it is only half developed today, I will demonstrate how to understand why a rule has been broken.
In the following BPMN diagram, I have failed to connect a Task to the End Event. I have made it obvious here but it could be easy to overlook in a larger diagram. In fact, I know of one company who were advised by a “consultant” that there must be something wrong when the end of a connector goes red therefore you should move it away from the shape until it goes green! The result was that the company had over 300 flow diagrams without a single valid connection! That company is no more!
One of the best bits of Visio is the connections between shapes, but it has always been difficult to understand these connections in code. There are connections to and from shapes, which require you to understand where you are and which way to look … at the beginning or the end of a 1D connector. Visio 2010 has added some useful extra methods to the shape object which makes understanding connections much easier. This post will show you how you can use the new GluedShapes() and ConnectedShapes() methods.
Take, for example, a network diagram where there are connections between servers and routers:
You may wish to list the connections at the start and end of each cable. Previously, this would have meant inspecting the connected cell to see if was at the beginning or end of the line, but now you can use the GluedShapes() method of a shape to retrieve an array of the 2D shapes connected at one end or another with the relevant arguments, visGluedShapesIncoming2D or visGluedShapesOutgoing2D. The ListGluedConnections macro below displays the following in the immediate window:
Connector Dynamic connector
> Router.45 router-02
< Server server-01 Connector Dynamic connector.107 > Router.45 router-02
< Server.30 server-02 Connector Dynamic connector.108 > Router router-01
< Server.75 server-03 Connector Dynamic connector.109 > Router.91 router-03
< Server.30 server-02 Connector Dynamic connector.110 > Router.91 router-03
< Server server-01
Public Sub ListGluedConnections()
Dim shp As Visio.Shape
Dim connectorShape As Visio.Shape
Dim sourceShape As Visio.Shape
Dim targetShape As Visio.Shape
Dim aryTargetIDs() As Long
Dim arySourceIDs() As Long
Dim targetID As Long
Dim sourceID As Long
Dim i As Integer
For Each shp In Visio.ActivePage.Shapes
If shp.OneD Then
Debug.Print "Connector", shp.Name
arySourceIDs = shp.GluedShapes(visGluedShapesIncoming2D, "")
For i = 0 To UBound(arySourceIDs)
Set sourceShape = Visio.ActivePage.Shapes.ItemFromID(arySourceIDs(i))
If sourceShape.CellExists("Prop.NetworkName", Visio.visExistsAnywhere) Then
Debug.Print , ">", sourceShape.Name, sourceShape.Cells("Prop.NetworkName").ResultStr("")
End If
Next
aryTargetIDs = shp.GluedShapes(visGluedShapesOutgoing2D, "")
For i = 0 To UBound(aryTargetIDs)
Set targetShape = Visio.ActivePage.Shapes.ItemFromID(aryTargetIDs(i))
If targetShape.CellExists("Prop.NetworkName", Visio.visExistsAnywhere) Then
Debug.Print , "<", targetShape.Name, targetShape.Cells("Prop.NetworkName").ResultStr("")
End If
Next
End If
Next
End SubSimilarly, you may want to simply list the next connected 2D shape, effectively ignoring the cable. In this case, you can use the new ConnectedShapes() method, with the relevant arguments visGluedShapesIncoming2D or visGluedShapesOutgoing2D, to produce an output like the following ( using the ListNextConnections macro below):
Shape Server server-01
> Router.45 router-02
> Router.91 router-03
Shape Router router-01
< Server.75 server-03 Shape Server.30 server-02 > Router.45 router-02
> Router.91 router-03
Shape Router.45 router-02
< Server server-01
< Server.30 server-02 Shape Server.75 server-03 > Router router-01
Shape Router.91 router-03
< Server server-01
< Server.30 server-02
Public Sub ListNextConnections()
Dim shp As Visio.Shape
Dim connectorShape As Visio.Shape
Dim sourceShape As Visio.Shape
Dim targetShape As Visio.Shape
Dim aryTargetIDs() As Long
Dim arySourceIDs() As Long
Dim targetID As Long
Dim sourceID As Long
Dim i As Integer
For Each shp In Visio.ActivePage.Shapes
If Not shp.OneD Then
If shp.CellExists("Prop.NetworkName", Visio.visExistsAnywhere) Then
Debug.Print "Shape", shp.Name, shp.Cells("Prop.NetworkName").ResultStr("")
arySourceIDs = shp.ConnectedShapes(visConnectedShapesOutgoingNodes, "")
For i = 0 To UBound(arySourceIDs)
Set sourceShape = Visio.ActivePage.Shapes.ItemFromID(arySourceIDs(i))
If sourceShape.CellExists("Prop.NetworkName", Visio.visExistsAnywhere) Then
Debug.Print , "<", sourceShape.Name, sourceShape.Cells("Prop.NetworkName").ResultStr("") End If Next aryTargetIDs = shp.ConnectedShapes(visConnectedShapesIncomingNodes, "") For i = 0 To UBound(aryTargetIDs) Set targetShape = Visio.ActivePage.Shapes.ItemFromID(aryTargetIDs(i)) If targetShape.CellExists("Prop.NetworkName", Visio.visExistsAnywhere) Then Debug.Print , ">", targetShape.Name, targetShape.Cells("Prop.NetworkName").ResultStr("")
End If
Next
End If
End If
Next
End SubI think this makes interrogation of connected diagrams, of all flavours, much simpler, though I would love to have similar ShapeSheet functions too!
Microsoft have begun publishing a series of short videos, based around Mr. Clarity, a gumshoe-like character who inhabits your desktop, to promote the use of Visio in the workplace. It will be interesting to see how the plot develops over time … Will Facilities, IT and HR every get along with each other? Will all the loose connections come together in the end? Will VisioGuy make a guest appearance? Enjoy!
( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtgYTWRdTSU )
( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGtE5RdME-Q )
Watch out for more, and also see the related videos that appear in YouTube.
One of the templates to get a revision in Visio 2010 is the Cross Functional Flowchart template because of the new list and containment functionality that has been added into the core application. I had to write a small bit of code in earlier versions of Visio for each flowchart shape to automatically understand which swimlane and phase it belongs to, but now there are ShapeSheet functions available, so a slight modification of a flowchart master enables it to inherit values from the swimlane that it is in. This article demonstrates who you can do this to, for example, synchronize the fill color of each flowchart shape to that of the swimlane that it belongs to.
[Read more…] about Visio 2010 : Containment and Cross-Functional Flowcharts