bVisual

Validation

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Microsoft Visio 2010 Business Process Diagramming and Validation book published

Phew … my new book is published, and I have a new Visio 2010 add-in, Rules Tools, to accompany it.

If you are a Microsoft Visio 2010 Premium Edition user or developer who wants to get to grips with both the basic features of Visio 2010 and the new Validation Rules in this edition, then this book is for you. A working knowledge of Microsoft Visio, and optionally .NET for the add-in code, is required, though previous knowledge of business process diagramming is not necessary. More experienced Visio users will gain valuable knowledge for building add-ins and creating and publishing rules. If you want to achieve results from Visio 2010 beyond the ordinary out-of-the-box features, then this book is ideal for you. Although this book covers the Premium Edition, much of the book is still useful if you are a Visio 2010 Standard Edition or Professional Edition user.

Microsoft Visio 2010

Microsoft Visio 2010 Business Process Diagramming and Validation :
https://www.packtpub.com/microsoft-visio-2010-business-process-diagramming/book

Rules Tools

The new Validation API enables businesses to write custom validation rules to suit their own purposes.
Microsoft Visio 2010 provides built-in rule sets for flowcharts, BPMN diagrams and SharePoint Designer Workflows. However, it does not provide a rule set developer interface for the analyzing, amending or creating rules. This Rules Tools add-in fills this gap by providing an extra group in the Process tab in Visio 2010 that allows users to analyze existing rules, display issues, and to export/import rule sets.

Go to the Rules Tools page for more information

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Writing rules to validate diagrams in Visio 2010 – A worked example

Microsoft Visio 2010 Premium Edition introduced an extension to the Visio Type Library called the Validation API. This provides the capability to validate a Visio diagram to ensure that its construction complies with industry-standard or company –wide rules.

Organizations are able to use this new feature to encapsulate business logic as validation rules, grouped within rule sets.

Microsoft Visio 2010 Premium edition contains rule sets for use with Basic and Cross-Functional Flowcharts, BPMN Diagrams and SharePoint Workflow Designer diagrams.

This article describes how you can create your own rule sets and rules.

[Read more…] about Writing rules to validate diagrams in Visio 2010 – A worked example

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Visio 2010 Validation Rules (part 2)

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….

imageThe stencil will be docked with the other shape stencils, but, of course, this stencil does not have any shapes … only VBA code.

[Read more…] about Visio 2010 Validation Rules (part 2)

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Visio 2010 Validation Rules (part 1)

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!

image
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