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Creating a Schema from Visio External Data record sets

Visio introduced External Data record sets in 2007, and I have made great use of them ever since. Visio 2013 has deprecated reverse engineering of databases to produce a schema, which was a function that I loved to use because it allowed me to provide clients with up to date, annotated, enhanced schema diagrams. Microsoft have, however, provided some nice database schema templates in Visio 2013 Professional, so I thought I would provide a way to use the External Data record sets to produce schema diagrams.

I have created a new custom stencil, based upon the IDEF1X Database Notation template in Visio 2013 Professional, and have added some macros to provide the guided diagramming. I say guided because page position of tables and relationships are left to you, but the macros will create table definitions from External Data record sets.

All of the three database notation templates contain an Entity and an Attribute master. In fact, they also have a Primary Key Attribute master too, but this is identical to the Attribute master, apart from a setting to say it is the primary key. This can be done from the Attribute shape anyway, so I will dispense with the Primary Key Attribute master.

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Mapping SharePoint List Columns to Visio Shape Data Types

The shape data in Visio 2013 diagrams can be linked to many external data sources, and one of the most useful is a SharePoint List. However, the Shape Data rows have a smaller number of expected data types than the column types that are available in SharePoint. This article begins an exploration of the mapping of SharePoint list column types to Visio data types.

The Type cell of a Shape Data row defines the data type, which is a number from 0 to 7, that is stored in that row.

Data TypeDescription
0String
1Fixed List
2Number
3Boolean
4Variable List
5Date or Time
6Duration
7Currency

The Format cell can modify the display of Value, or can provide the option values for the two list types.

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Visio Map of the World Update

My earlier post about the world in Visio shapes, see http://blog.bvisual.net/2013/08/16/visio-map-of-the-world/ , has been one of my most popular, and a reader recently asked about changing the colour of countries by data not in my original worksheet, and another asked about adding labelled dots.

Well, at first, I thought it would be quite simple to add more Data Graphics with the Color By Value that I already had, but then I realised that I needed to adjust some of the shapes that I had created from SVG in my previous article.

The problem is that some of the country shapes which were converted from SVG have geometry at the top group level. This means that any Data Graphic items, other than Color By Value, are actually sub-shapes of the group and will be hidden by the country shape itself. That is probably why the Data Graphics task, on the selected Afghanistan shape below, sent the AF label over to the right of it, whereas all the group shapes with all their geometry in sub-shapes, such as the AE (United Arab Emirates) shape, placed the label in its centre.

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Making the Off-Page Reference Hyperlink URL Safe

One of my favourite shapes in Visio is the Off-page reference shape on the Basic Flowchart Shapes stencil. I have written about this shape before ( see http://blog.bvisual.net/2011/09/02/page-grids-and-off-page-references/ ) but I did not notice a slight issue with it previously, so this article show how to overcome a couple of issues that I discovered whilst working on a project recently.

The shape is so useful for creating links between different pages and shapes within a Visio document (and can even be used to link between Visio documents), but it achieves this is a couple of ways. When dropped on to a page, it runs an add-on to prompt for the creation of a paired shape on an existing or new page.

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New Visio book out now!

After the trip to Hyderabad for the Visio MVP Conference, as described in my previous post, my wife and I went to Bangalore, Vadodara, and Mumbai. This gave me the chance to drop-in on Packt Publishing because this is the week that my new book is published ( see http://www.packtpub.com/microsoft-visio-2013-business-process-diagramming-and-validation/book ). The book’s title is Microsoft Visio 2013 Business Process Diagramming and Validation, and, although this is an update to my 2010 book (with an extra chapter for integration with Office365 and SharePoint 2013), it should resonate with a wider audience because Microsoft decided to merge the Premium and Professional editions into one Professional edition for Visio 2013, so that it now includes Visio Services and Validation. This means that there are millions more Visio users who can take advantage of validation rules to ensure that they have well-constructed diagrams in Visio. I would also like to stress that validation rules can be applied to all types of diagrams, not just process diagrams, and I will demonstrate this over the next few months here.

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The First MVP Conference in Hyderabad, India

Back in February this year, I reported on the Visio MVPs in Redmond (see http://blog.bvisual.net/2013/02/ ).Well one thing that we learnt back then was that Microsoft had started the transition of the Visio Engineering to Hyderabad in India. Later, Microsoft also announced that the MVP Summits were going to be changed from spring to fall (or autumn if you are not North American). So, this year was to be exceptional because there was going to be two MVP Summits whilst the transition took place. That left the new Visio team in a bit of a quandary : where to hold the fall summit? Redmond, with the rest of the MVP community, or Hyderabad, with just the Visio product team? I was delighted that they took the brave step of holding it in Hyderabad, whilst the rest of the MVPs went to Redmond last year.

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