Container Shapes

[SStein]

I'm beginning the process of creating several custom shapes for a project
and I've discovered the need to create a "container" shape. That is, a shape
that would appear in the main diagram as a single shape but could be opened
up to reveal a number of custom shapes and/or connections inside. Basically
I need a shape in a Visio diagram that contains another independent Visio
diagram.

I've done research in the Visio help and online and haven't been able to
locate any information on this kind of shape. Is this behavior possible in
Visio?

Thanks in advance for any help, much appreciated.

 

[John]

Dear S,

Try searching Google for "Visio Doubleclick group and open into another
Window".

Hope that helps

Best regards

John

 

[SStein]

John,

Not exactly what I had in mind, but this seems to be very close to what I'm
looking for. Another part of what I'd like to have (which I should've
mentioned before) is to be able to change the appearance of the group.

More specifically, can the group contain several shapes and connections but
still appear on the main diagram as one shape? I'd like a group to actually
contain a number of shapes but appear on the diagram as just a single box,
until you double click the group and it opens in another window. I looked
through the group options but was unable to find anything.

Thanks again for the help.

 

[SStein]

I thought of a good example for what I'm trying to do, hopefully this helps:

I'd like to have a refrigerator shape in a diagram. It's just a square with
a label on it. But when you double click the refrigerator shape, it opens up
the shape in a new window to reveal all the items that are in the
refrigerator. For example, the refrigerator shape would be gone in the new
window replaced by a little "milk" shape and a "butter" shape and so on.

A rather silly example, but hopefully this describes what I'm trying to do.
Thanks again.

 

[John]

Hi there,

Well it depends on if you definitely want to create a new window. Would you
be happy with double clicking your refridgerator shape which would then link
to another page diplaying the contents shapes? If that's ok then take a
look at off-page reference (OPR) shapes in the Basic Flowchart stencil.
This is a shape that can be set with a hyperlink to another page. You could
then either adapt the geometry of that shape to a refridgerator shape or
take a not of how Visio uses the off-page referencing and add this
functionality to your shape. (Take a look at the 3 "User.OPC..." cells in
the OPR, which give a unique ID to the connecting and connected shapes + the
target page ID, also the Hyperlink section and EventDblClick cell in the
Events section of the shape's shapesheet.

On the grouping shapes side, the action of grouping shapes actually produces
a new shape (with no geometry). So I guess you could add a User. cell to
the group shape like User.ContentsVisible, which could be a boolean value (0
or 1), and then the contents shapes visibility could reference that User
cell in the group shape. You might find that this gives unexpected results
in automatic layout etc. but I guess you could play around with this to find
out how it behaves.

My money would be on the off-page reference shape, but it will obviously
depend on your final requirement.

Just one other point, is that with code there would be a number of other
options, but this will depend on your expertise/budget/time.............

Anyway, hope that's useful

Best regards

John