I am working on a project where Visio Online process diagrams are embedded within a SharePoint web page, and was surprised that the JavaScript onShapeMouseEnter() event was not being triggered as the mouse cursor moved over some of my shapes. After much searching by myself, and my colleague Seb Craft, we found that only the sub-shapes in the group were firing the event … So what was the problem?
I was recently laying out a computer room floor plan to scale in Visio, from survey data of the cabinets\racks within it, and it occurred to me that I could work a bit smarter than I first thought. Originally, I was going to just add lots of rectangles, size them, rotate them, and label each them with their name. Then I thought, why not use the Width, Depth and Name columns from the survey data to do most of the work for me? It was so simple to do, and only took a few minutes, so I thought I would share my methodology because it demonstrates how easy it is to work smarter with Visio….
These are the simple steps shown above, written out for your education….
[Read more…] about Changing Visio Shape Size and Angle with Linked DataI have written many add-ins for Visio over the years, some for private clients for use in-house, some as products for public release by my clients or by me, and some just to help me with my day-to-day Visio development tasks. The ease of installation is always an issue, and I have been using a digital certificate to guarantee its authenticity in almost all of these scenarios. I have also included licensing code from a third-party for some of my own products, but have been aware that the third-party product I have been using is not ideal because it needs its own registered component on the client machine. So, when a client asked that I use Advanced Installer to create the installation setups so that their licensing system could be used, then I was (and still am) all for it because it could become a better method for myself. However, there are some issues that I am overcoming through this transition ….not least that an apparently correctly assigned digital certificate was actually not valid.
I wrote an article last year about Swapping Images in a #Visio Shape manually, but I want to be able to do this whenever a Shape Data value changes. This is because I use I invariably use shapes linked to data. I also want to be able to have multiple images within a single grouped shape, and all of them changing when their referenced Shape Data values change. I believe that this will be more adaptable for a lot of scenarios than trying to repurpose Data Graphic Icon Sets ( see Make Your Own Visio Data Graphic Icons Sets … automatically). I also discovered that the Shape.ChangePicture(…) function can just as easily work with urls as it can with network file paths, so even more possibilities are opened up! For example, the Visio Online JavaScript API has the ability to overlay an image (see ShapeView.addOverlay(…)).
So, I have created some macros to provide quick and easy selection, positioning and updating of images within a group shape.
I decided to present this article with VBA code rather than my preferred C# so that a stencil could be downloaded to provide instant usability, rather than having to install an add-in. It can be download from Image Utils.vssm, and should then be placed in to My Shapes folder, so that it becomes available to open in Visio. When it is opened, then the macros will need to be enabled.
There are just five public macros:
I love writing Visio automation code, but I really don’t like writing setup & deployment scripts. There are so many variables : What Visio version, which edition? Which bitness (x86 or x64)? What are the user settings for the paths of stencils or templates?
So, I decided to write myself some C# functions that can be used in custom actions for an installation writing application, such as Advanced Installer. I think of the methods as being in one of three phases, Installation; Functionality and Configuration. The registry has three different areas to search within, Classes Root (HKCR); Local Machine (HKLM) and Current User (HKCU). In addition, the best way to get the true file version of Visio is to use FileInfo on the executable. The following screenshots are from a Cross-Functional Flowchart of the functions that get values for variables, and use them in other functions, until, eventually, the current user settings can be read.
Each of the functions I wrote handle the part of the registry that needs to be used. By that I mean that some settings for 64bit Visio on 64bit Windows will be in a different branch than 32bit Visio on 64bit Windows.
The first function gets the current version of the application associated with Visio drawings:
It was the last day of the MSIgnite conference today, and the video of the final presentation about Visio was worth staying for, even though some of it was content I knew about, and have mentioned in previous posts this week ( see Dive into the world of data-driven operation intelligence with Microsoft Visio, Excel and Power BI). However, there was some content I was particularly pleased to see, and that was about support for the Visio Online JavaScript API support in Modern SharePoint Framework. I have pulled out some of the key slides below, but check out the full session for more information.
The hardworking Microsoft Visio product development team have worked hard to almost match all of the functionality of the old server-side Visio services control, but they haven’t quite got everything. So I cheered when I hear that support for html overlays are in the roadmap to be supported! All I ask for now (almost) is layer control, and I will be very happy.
They also stated that they will be enabling all this functionality for non-SharePoint web sites in the future!
Go to http://aka.ms/voapireference got more details.
