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Protecting the integrity of custom Visio masters

All of my Visio solutions contain custom masters because this is the best way to create smart shapes that respond to user’s needs. This usually means creating Shape Data, User-defined Cells and Action rows that govern aspects of the shape with formulas designed to provide an efficient user interface. As a developer I sometimes forget that other users may not perform the same actions as I do, and can accidently undo all my intended behaviour. For example, in recent testing of a visual stream mapping system that I am working on, my carefully constructed master-shape relationship was being broken by grouping some of them together, thus changing their behavior and hiding them from some of the custom functions. The reason given was to that they want to create copies and this seemed like a reasonable way to do it. Now, I have known that this is bad ever since my original Visio developer training back in 1996, so I always avoid doing this, and erroneously thought that other would know this too. I was wrong to be so myopic, so I explored how I can best prevent this and other user actions that could break the intended master-shape relationship.

  • Multiple instances of a single master shape
  • Locking some properties of the shape
  • Modifying group behaviour
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Migrating from Lucidchart to Visio?

My fellow Visio MVP, Michel Laplane, and I recently converted and transformed 15k Lucidchart documents to Microsoft Visio for a large multi-national organization. This was approximately 4 years after they had moved from Visio to Lucidchart! I do not know the full reason behind these changes in technology, and I do not have a particular dislike of Lucidchart, but my passion is Visio, so I was willing to assist SohoDragon in this migration for their client. The Lucidchart application is solely a web-based diagramming system with the documents stored in AWS, so perhaps it does not fit easily within the corporate compliance architecture of Microsoft Azure, Teams and SharePoint. Microsoft Visio though has the same files for both the desktop and web editions, although there are some restrictions in the size and features of editing Visio document in the web. However, all the M365 users will have the ability to view and comment of the Visio documents that they have permission for. Visio Plan 1 or Plan 2 subscriptions will be required for editing the migrated documents because they have not been created with the templates provided in Visio for M365, and Visio documents which have any page with over a thousand shapes will currently only be editable in the Visio desktop edition. The Lucidchart documents needed to be audited, exported and transformed into Visio documents, and then uploaded to similar folders in SharePoint, where user permissions could be applied. We decided to use multiple secure Windows VMs to process the documents and then upload them to SharePoint before the VMs were deleted.

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Installing Visio Templates and Stencils

I was recently on holiday but needed to update an installation of Visio Templates and Stencils for all languages. I use Advanced Installer in Enterprise mode so that I can edit the PublishComponent table like I have described in my earlier article ( see Using Advanced Installer with Visio VSTO Add-Ins – bVisual )Unfortunately I only had my travel laptop and could not refer to previous projects. Instead I referred to an excellent article on UnmanagedVisio, and tried the suggested Component IDs for All Versions of Templates and Stencils

However, these do not work for me using Visio Plan 2. Nothing showed up in the Visio UI. So, this article describes how it works for me using Advanced Installer.

  • Advanced Installer Organization
  • Advanced Installer Component table
  • Advanced Installer PublishComponent table
  • Visio Published Template Category
  • Published Visio Template
  • Published Visio Stencils
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Creating a Dynamic connector master automatically

I have been creating Microsoft Visio solutions for 30 years now … my first was in 1996! I have been an advocate for custom Masters from the very start, every since I learnt how editing the Master can automatically update all of its instance shapes can be automatically updated throughout the document. Whenever you drag and drop a Master from a Stencil into a document for the first time, it copies that Master to the Document Stencil, and from then on it will use the local Master in the Document Stencil to create new shape instances that reference the local Master. If you need to customise the local Master, then you should ensure that the Match master by name on drop is checked. All of the provided stencils contain Masters where this property is not checked. The main exception to this is the Dynamic connector Master. Not only is this Master provided with this property checked, it is also automatically created when you do certain actions. This article explains when this is done in the UI and in code.

  • Adding a Rectangle shape
  • Selecting an Ellipse shape
  • Adding an Ellipse shape
  • Adding a Line shape
  • Lines do not glue to shapes by default
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How SVG in Visio can cause a Shape.BoundingBox(…) error

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?

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Post-Processing Paste from Clipboard in Visio

One of my current Visio VSTO add-in projects requires me to react to users pasting custom shapes in the Visio page from the clipboard. The process involves registering the ExitScope event and then checking the Clipboard contents. Initially, I was merely testing for a line in the DataObject that started with the word “Visio “, but then testing revealed that copying and pasting text from one shape to another was also getting processed, so then I added a further check that the line also finished with the word ” Shapes”. This works fine, but then I got to wonder if I could also post-process tables copied and pasted from Excel because the standard paste maintains font settings but omits the tabs and line feeds, making the text unusable without serious manual editing. This article explains how this can done.

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