 |
Visio 2003 Developer's Survival Pack Tools and Samples |
ShapeSheet Developer Helper |
Visio 2002/3 DSP home
This
page |
Overview
SSDevHelper provides a couple of helpful utility features of interest to
ShapeSheet developers:
- Viewing and editing of a shape's data in VDX (XML) form. Especially useful
for setting up many cells or rows that are similar.
- Reordering of rows in sections of ShapeSheet that have named rows, a
function unavailable in the ShapeSheet window.
(Both of these functions rely on Visio 2003 XML IDataObject features, so
SSDevHelper does not work with Visio 2002.)
XMLEmitIndents: Important Note
By default, Visio 2003's VDX save creates "compact" XML that omits indents
and linebreaks. This is hard to read in a text editor and does not work well
with SSDevHelper either. To get Visio 2003 to output sensibly formatted XML, set
registry setting XMLEmitIndents to "1":
Windows Registry Editor
Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Visio\Application]
"XMLEmitIndents"="1" |
XML Data ScreenShot

XML Data Operation
- Launch SSDevHelper.exe from Windows Explorer (or create a shortcut for
it).
- In Visio, select a particular shape, page or document. In SSDevHelper,
press one of the buttons in the "Read From Drawing" panel, reflecting what
kind of item you want from Visio, and where you would like the data to go. For
example, to send shape data to the XML "memo" edit area (as shown in the
screenshot), use the Memo button in the Shape column.
- You can edit, copy, paste and so on in the XML area.
- You can write data to the Visio drawing using one of the buttons in the
"Write To Drawing" panel. For example, having edited in the XML panel, you can
write this revised shape data to the drawing using the XML Memo button in the
"From" column. This results in a new shape in the bottom left corner of the
drawing page.
XML Data Notes
- It's entirely possible to introduce errors if you edit the XML. When you
write this erroneous data into Visio, Visio shows an error dialog from which
you can inspect Visio's log of import errors.
- When you read a Shape's worth of data from Visio, you may be surprised how
much there is. In fact, even for a single shape, Visio 2003 provides an entire
document's worth of data, and it's up to SSDevHelper to trim this down.
SSDevHelper omits all unneeded pages and shapes on the selected page. However
SSDevHelper does not currently attempt to omit all other data (masters, styles
etc) that are not needed. You may, however, manually delete them if you know
they are not needed (ie: refered to by the Shape data you intend to write back
to Visio).
Row Reorder ScreenShot

Row Reorder Operation
- Select a Shape in Visio, then in SSDevHelper press the Select button.
SSDevHelper displays all available named rows.
- Move rows up or down by dragging in the "Row" column. When satisfied...
- Press the Reorder button. This results in a new shape in the bottom left
corner of the drawing page.
Row Reorder Notes
1. Note that Row Reorder creates a new (copy) shape, it cannot reorder the
rows in an existing shape.
2. You can select a member shape to perform a row-reorder upon. This
results in a copy of the original group shape, with the member shape having
reordered rows.
3. In sections where the rows may be optionally named (eg: Connection
Points), when you reorder the rows SSDevHelper has to provide some default names
to perform the reorder. If you don't like these names, you can edit them either
before or after reordering.
Release History
Date |
Version Number |
Description/Issues |
2003-10-21 |
0.3.0.0 |
|
|
|
|
__________ |
|
|
Article Created: 2001-06-01 Last edit: Last edit:
03-10-29 Graham
Wideman
Go to:
DiagramAntics.com