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Visio Rules

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Update of Free Rules Tools for Visio Validation

Microsoft introduced Validation Rules in Visio 2010 Premium, and I was excited enough to write a book about it. Microsoft merged the Premium into the Professional edition in 2013, so I updated my book. I wrote an interface into the Visio Validation API as a free VSTO add-in, called Rules Tools. It was normal to install the 32bit edition of Office back then, but now 64bit is the default, so I have update the setup to detect whether a 32bit or 64bit edition needs to be installed, before continuing.

So now, anyone who has Visio Professional or Visio Plan 2 can use this free tool which provides the only interface available to review, import, export and write Visio Validation rules.

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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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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.

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