Visio 2002 Developer's Survival Pack Tools and Samples
	Visio To XML Mass Converter
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Overview

Starting with Visio 2002, Visio is able to save drawings, templates and stencils in "XML for Visio" format.  As a result, a number of circumstances lead us to want to convert whole collections of Visio documents to XML at once. Examples:

• Conversion to XML can be a tremendous way to inspect Visio's supplied templates and stencils, allowing you to use text and XML tools to find items of interest, such as uses of various ShapeSheet functions, or use of persistent events. 
   
• In a business process scenario, it may be desirable to convert Visio documents to XML to perform changes or rule-checks upon them en-masse.

The VisioToXML tool addresses this need by allowing you to specify a group of Visio files to process, and the tool iterates through them all, loading them into Visio and resaving them using XML format.

ScreenShot

Installation

No special installation required. Simply double-click on VisioToXML.exe in Windows Explorer. You can optionally create a Windows Shortcut for it.

Grep

One very useful tool for searching text files for interesting strings in the XML files is venerable old "grep" and its descendants -- often supplied with development environments. A favorite of mine is Hurricane WinGrep, but there are also other versions discoverable with a quick web search.

Article Created: 2001-06-01  Last edit: Last edit: 01-07-26 Graham Wideman
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