Visio Shape Programing Help

[Fred Djinn Holstings]

Hi,
I'm a serious noobie and I was wondering if I can get help from here. My
problem is this.

I have a Visio 2003 file that shows the hierarchy of all our documents. I
was able to add a shape for each document and connected them to the proper
parent document with connection points. I also modified the properties to
have custom properties that get populated with the document number and title
as well as what parent it is related to and what subordinates are related to
it. My boss wants me to see if it is possible to create a "macro" (I'm
familiar but not good at it whatsoever) that will automatically change the
border and fill color of the related documents when a parent of subordinate
is changed. Here's an example.

Documents "xzy", "pqf", & "drg" are related to document "abc" if document
abc gets changed then the shapes for "xzy", "pqf", & "drg" should change the
border and fill color to indicate that they too may need changes. Also to be
recursive, if document "pqf" changes then the shape for "abc" needs to change
it's colors.

Is this even possible and if so how in the world would I make this work?

Thanks Very Much In Advance,
Fred

 

[Mark Nelson [MS]]

That is certainly possible through code but would be a fairly complex task.
This goes far beyond a simple macro. Based on your description, you need to
handle events to detect a change, analyze the connectivity of shapes to
understand the hierarchy and then update shape properties. If you want to
learn more about programming in Visio, I suggest you download the SDK and
look through the code examples.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...bd-b0bb-46e7-936a-b8539898d44d&displaylang=en

--
Mark Nelson
Office Graphics - Visio
Microsoft Corporation

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

 

[Fred Djinn Holstings]

Ouch! Thanks for the info, I'll download it right now and see what I can find
out.

Thanks Bunches,
Fred

 

[Brandon]

That seems impressive. Is your Visio file synched to a database?

I'm trying to work on a corporate document control system for projects,
where documents are listed in an Excel spreadsheet, for example. I would love
to have a Visio 2007 project link to this data and plot the hierarchy based
on criterion in the spreadsheet. The hiearchy is easily defined actually.
Something like ##.##.## would suffice i.e.

a parent,
01.00.00
could have children,
01.01.00
01.02.00
01.03.00
which could have grandchildren,
01.03.01
01.03.02
....
etc.

Where should I look on the Excel programming side and Visio side? Do I need
to learn VBscript?

Thanks