Visio 2002 Developer's Survival Pack Tools and Samples
	XML Browse
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Overview

While Visio's native file format has always been proprietary and thus inscrutable, with the arrival of Visio 2002 we are now able to inspect its XML rendition directly. This is a tremendous step forward in terms of the ability to understand the Visio document data structure, let alone the opportunities for interesting functionality that it affords.

Of course an XML file can be inspected in a simple text editor, and somewhat more elegantly in Internet Explorer. However, I thought we needed a fast and simple treeview browser to let us navigate around Visio XML files quickly, and the result is this simple XML Browser. It comes in very handy when:

• Finding where in the Visio object hierarchy particular data is stored.
• Inspecting how Visio stores particular data (so that we can generate the same in our own XML solutions).
• Quickly inspecting output from our own solutions.

ScreenShot/Instructions

Installation

No special installation required. Simply double-click on XMLBrowse.exe in Windows Explorer. You can optionally create a Window Shortcut for it in the usual Windows ways.

Note that XMLBrowse does same some settings in an INI file in its home directory. Therefore it needs to run from a writeable directory.

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