Development, Visual Studio

Introducing IdMso visual studio extension

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A few months ago I released a visual studio extension, that provides autocomplete if you edit office ribbon files. The extension is open source, and published on GitHub.

By now, it proved to be more of less functional and even some issues with Office 2016 icons were fixed thanks to the user feedback! 🙂

What it can do for you – it can assist you if you edit the XML files to define interface for your extensions in the Visual Studio editor.

The code is based on famous glyphfriend extension (if you don’t use it yet – you should start, it’s great). Initially there was a plan to merge this part into that extension, but it proved to be quite heavy with all those 5000 office icons, so it is now separate thing.

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svgpublish

Layers support in html publishing

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With new update to Version 1.0.9 there is new out-of-the-box function of the Svg Publish extension – layer support!

Now you can publish diagrams, and add optional layer management, to allow switching layers on/off on the published diagram. This allows to control diagram’s layers on the web to show/hide it’s parts. Check out the example: Suzuki FA50 Shuttle electrical schematic. Yep, in 1990s it was all pretty simple. You can turn on/off wires of the corresponding color by clicking the layer switch, to see what is connected with what. This is out of the box. Alternatively (this part is provided by extra tiny script) – you can turn layers on/of by clicking shapes. For example, if you click a lamp, all wires which are connected to that lamp will be turned on/off. Click the picture to go to live diagram.

The source diagram:
1981-91-Suzuki-FA50-Shuttle.vsd_.zip (152.9 KiB)

To enable layers functionality, it’s enough to set checkbox Enable layers when publishing:

Development, svgpublish, svgpublish-usecase

Pokemon office – more html popovers

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New sample with updated javascript code / template created with svg publishing, to show stuff in the office (click the picture open it live)

https://nbelyh.github.io/svgpublishdemo/demo/PokemonBldgPlan2.html

The javascript is very similar to the one described in the Dynamic popups on published diagrams, you can check it in the source diagram. Just the formatting is different, now it builds a chunk of HTML and populates it with some images/properties from the shapes.

The source diagram and the excel file are here:  PokemonBldgPlan.zip (577.3 KiB)

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Development, svgpublish

Dynamic popups (“popovers”) on published diagrams

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With HTML export, you  can specify any information to show on popup (bootstrap popover)

Firs, simple demo (rectangle):

Live sample: https://cdn.rawgit.com/nbelyh/svgpublishdemo/fa70891f/SimplePopover.html Souce:  SimplePopover.vsd (14.5 KiB)

This is just stock popover. The code just defines a standard bootstrap popover, but for a Visio shape (#shape1).

$("#shape1").popover({
   title: "Hello",
   content: "This is some sample text",
   placement: "top",
   container: "body"
 });

The result might not look that impressive, but I hope it looks clear.

Now let’s go for something more advanced. Lets take stock diagram and show in the popover info about the relevant computer models from the HP website.
Click the image to open it live (again, hosted on GitHub)

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Development, svgpublish

Exporting html diagrams – binding to live services

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This post briefly explains how to bind Visio diagram, exported as HTML to some external live web-service.
It’s based on the HTML/SVG export extension.

If you want the exported diagram to be connected to some live data,  you’ll need to connect to some live service (in this example, we consider a REST service). In the following posts, I’ll discuss binding a diagram to a SharePoint list using JSOM / REST.

So, let’s take map of Europe and show temperature by coloring countries, with colder colors indicating colder temperature! You can check the result in DEMO section (click the picture to navigate):

Here is basically the sequence of steps how to build it:

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svgpublish

Exporting Visio diagrams as html

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Do you want to build interactive diagrams which are available via web?

Well, Visio SharePoint Services are there, but what if you want to go one step further than that and control/animate shapes more precisely and use standard css3 animations for example, or if you don’t have / don’t need SharePoint Enterprise?

The good old HTML/SVG export is here to help you with that! And yes, you can still have your diagrams in SharePoint. Or on GitHub pages. Or on your network drive 🙂

stuhlek

Check out what you can do with that!

Addin

Back-Sync: Visio “backward” data synchronization

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Visio has a nice feature, which allows you to link data to shapes. This allows you to create interactive dashboards for example, display data graphics which reflect the current state of some system on Visio diagrams, etc.

One thing may is occasionally needed, is a possibility to update your data source from Visio diagram. Meet the new add-in: BackSync

This add-in uses Visio data-binding infrastructure, and allows you to update the data in the external source from Visio (back-synchronize). There are limitations of course, but basically it should work with most data sources which support update (including Excel files, databases, and SharePoint lists).

Continue to the add-in’s page

Source

Using SolutionXML with C#

 

Visio has a feature which allows third-party solutions to store it’s custom data in Visio files as XML fragments. It might be useful if you don’t want to litter document or shapes shapesheet(s) with your data. Also it has an advantage that setting it, unlike setting cells in shapesheet, does not trigger undo/redo, so user’s work is not interfered.

Working with solution XML elements might require a bit work, here is a short code fragment how to deal with that in C#. The key point is that you need to create your own namespace in the XML, and then all your data should go there. The sample assumes that you want to store some “settings” in the solution xml element.

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