Visio Insights

Installing and Configuring Visio Services

With the past few posts we’ve shown you how you can share your diagrams with everyone using Visio Services. In this post, we’ll talk about how IT Administrators can provision and configure Visio Services in SharePoint 2010. Visio Services is included in SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Client Access License (ECAL). This post is intended to show you how to quickly get started with provisioning Visio Services, and to give you an idea of what things you should consider for configuration. The instructions in this post assume that you have already installed SharePoint 2010.

Quick Start with the Farm Configuration Wizard
SharePoint 2010 includes a Farm Configuration Wizard that makes it easy to quickly provision services, assign a service account, create a web application, and create a site collection. The easiest way to start using Visio Services is to use the Farm Configuration Wizard from Central Administration.

When you first install SharePoint 2010, you will be prompted to run this wizard. You can also easily run it again later from central administration:

Once you’ve launched the wizard, choose to have the wizard walk you through configuration. As one of the first steps of the wizard, you need to assign a service account, and then choose which services you want to provision. Make sure that “Visio Graphics Service” is checked. Visio Services is implemented in SharePoint 2010 as a single shared service called the Visio Graphics Service.

Select all the other services you would like to provision and click Next. (If you want to connect Visio diagrams to Excel workbooks, make sure “Excel Services” is checked too!)

(Note: image above does not show the full list of services available in the wizard)

The Farm Configuration Wizard will provision the checked services, and then prompt you to create a site collection. You can choose to create a new site collection, or do this step manually later. For a quick configuration, choose the “Team Site” template and create a new site collection:

(Notice the Visio Process Repository template! For more info see our earlier post: Using a Visio Process Repository)

After the wizard is finished, you can access your site with Visio Services enabled. To publish a web diagram to your site, see the following posts:

• Introducing Visio Services
• Publishing Diagrams to Visio Services
• Embedding a Web Drawing in a SharePoint Page
  

Configuration Options
The Farm Configuration Wizard gets you up and running quickly. If you want to work with all the configuration options, there are two ways you can do so:

• Central Administration (web user interface)
• PowerShell (command line interface)

Central Administration provides a web-based user interface for configuring all the service settings for Visio Services. If you prefer to use a scripting environment, you can use PowerShell to accomplish all the same tasks.

This TechNet article contains information about performing common configuration actions for Visio Services through both PowerShell and Central Administration. You can use also use the Get-Help cmdlet in PowerShell to see more information about and examples of specific cmdlets.

External Data Connections and Authentication
Recall that Visio Services allows you to share data-driven visualizations that are connected to live data. (For more info, see section “Refreshing data-driven diagrams” of this post). Supported data sources include:

• SQL
• SharePoint Lists
• Excel Workbooks hosted in SharePoint
• Any OLEDB/ODBC data sources that have recent drivers

When Visio Services renders drawings that are connected to Excel Services and SharePoint lists, permissions and authentication are managed by SharePoint, and Visio Services uses the identity of the person viewing the drawing. This way, if a user tries to view a Visio diagram that is connected to an Excel workbook that they do not have rights to view, they will not be able view the Visio diagram.

When connecting to data sources that are external to SharePoint, such as SQL or ODBC data sources, additional configuration may be required to enable Visio Services to connect to them. Visio Services can authenticate with external data sources in any of the following ways:

· Integrated Windows Authentication

· Secure Store Service (requires additional configuration)

· Unattended Service Account (requires additional configuration)

For more information about these authentication methods and how to plan for them, see this TechNet article.

Trusted Data Providers
Visio Services maintains a list of trusted data providers, so that you can manage what data sources the service is allowed to connect to. If a user creates a web drawing that is connected to a data source that is not trusted, Visio Services will not attempt to connect to the data source.

By default, trusted data providers include Excel Services, SharePoint lists, SQL databases, and some other ODBC data sources. You can easily add to or remove from this list using Central Administration and PowerShell.

Visio Services also allows you to create your own custom data providers to connect to additional data sources. These custom data providers need to be added to the trusted data providers list before the service will connect to them. We’ll be talking more about custom data providers in future blog posts.

Visio Services Settings
Visio Services has some global settings that allow you to optimize performance, caching, and security. Specifically, you can control:

• Caching
  Visio Services caches web drawings to improve performance. Caching allows multiple people to view the same diagram without forcing the server to render it every time. If a diagram changes, it is automatically removed from the cache. You can control how long diagrams are kept in the cache.

• Data refresh interval
  Data-driven diagrams and the data sets behind them are also cached. Caching data sets allows a user to view a data-driven diagram repeatedly without forcing the server to query the underlying data every time. This affects how quickly a user will see a change in data reflected in their diagram. You can control how long data sets are cached for.
  
• Maximum File Size
  To safeguard performance, you can control the maximum size of a web drawing that Visio Services will render.

For more information about Visio Services settings, see this TechNet article. We will also be talking more about how to optimize settings in a future blog post.

This post was a summary of the various installation and configuration options you have for Visio Services. As you try out Visio Services, please let us know what you think, either by commenting on the blog or via Send a Smile.

Building Visio 2010 – A Look Behind the Scenes

The Visio Product Team has been working for several years to design, code, test and deliver Visio 2010.  It takes lots of coordination and collaboration to develop a complex software application.  While there are many roles involved in the engineering process, it is the Program Managers, Developers and Testers that work together the most closely from beginning to end.  Program Managers gather customer input and design the features for the release.  Developers are the coders responsible for implementation of the software.  Testers ensure both high quality and that the capabilities really address the customer scenarios we have targeted. 

Microsoft has created a series of videos describing Office 2010 (the full wave of products being released) and some of the roles people play in the engineering process.  Here is a video about the engineering behind Visio 2010 from the perspective of the Tester.

Embedding a Web Drawing in a SharePoint Page

Previously we showed how Visio Services lets you view diagrams in the browser. By default Visio Web Drawings open in their own web page for a full screen viewing experience. Visio Services also allows Visio Web Drawings to be embedded in other SharePoint pages.

Using the Visio Web Access web part you can embed either static or data-driven Visio Web Drawings in SharePoint pages adding visual flair and insights to portal pages and dashboards. By centralizing relevant information onto one page, viewers save time and can, at a glance, understand the state of their business.

Take a look below at a Supply Chain Dashboard featuring a Visio Web Access web part in the top left – in this case the data-driven visual quickly helps ground viewers in the current state of a supply chain, and its proximity to a relevant Excel chart, documents and links makes decision making and implementation easy.

Embedding the Visio Web Access Web part in a SharePoint page

To embed a Web Drawing in a page, you must be a site administrator for that page with either "Contribute", "Approve", "Manage Hierarchy", "Design" or "Full Control" permissions. Given you are an administrator, adding a Web Drawing to a page is as easy as editing the page and placing a Visio Web Access web part on it. To do so, follow the steps below:

1. Click on "Edit" tab and then hit the "Edit Page" button
2. Click on a web part zone on the page
3. Click on "Insert" tab and then hit the "Web Part" button
4. Select the "Office Client Applications" category and select the "Visio Web Access" web part
5. Press the "Add" button

At this point, an empty Visio Web Access web part should appear on your page. It looks like this:

To assign an existing Web Drawing to display in this Web Part follow the “Click here to open the tool pane” link, this will surface the UI see below and will switch the page into Edit mode. This is called the web part’s the tool pane.

Type in the URL to the Web Drawing you want to display in the text box, or better yet, use the browser button to navigate the SharePoint folder structure to find the drawing in question. Once the URL is in the input field, hit either the “Apply” or “Ok” buttons at the bottom of the configuration panel and voilà – your Web Drawing is now embedded in the page.

Note that you can only embed Web Drawings that are hosted within the same SharePoint farm as the site hosting the web part. Also note that Visio Services checks the permissions of page viewers before it renders a Web Drawing -- if the viewer doesn’t have at least “View” permissions, Visio Services will not render the Web Drawing.

To complete the dashboard shown at the beginning of this article, repeat the process by adding other SharePoint and Office web parts.

Further Configuring the Visio Web Access Web Part

If you look below the “Web Drawing URL” property in the tool pane (see the tool pane image above), you’ll see a host of other properties you can set to customize the Visio Web Access web part. They include: 

As with any SharePoint web part, the Visio Web Access web part inherits and will honor the settings found in the “Appearance”, “Layout” and “Advanced” sections of the web part configuration panel.

Try it out!
Try out various web part configurations to understand which configuration best suits your needs and tell us about it either by commenting on the blog or via Send a Smile.

Publishing Diagrams to Visio Services

In our last post, we talked about Visio Services--a new feature of SharePoint 2010 that extends the reach of Visio diagrams considerably. Visio Services lets you:

• View diagrams in the browser even if you don’t have Visio installed
• Refresh data-driven diagrams in the browser
• Integrate diagrams into SharePoint applications

In this post, we explain how to create a Visio Web Drawing (*.VDW) file using Visio Professional 2010 or Visio Premium 2010. The Visio Web Drawing (*.VDW) is a new Visio file type that allows diagrams to be rendered in full fidelity in the browser using Visio Services on SharePoint 2010.

When you save a file in Visio 2010, you will see the option in the Save As dialog to save your diagram as a Web Drawing.

You can also easily create a Visio Web Drawing using the Save to SharePoint billboard on the Share tab of the Backstage View. This billboard allows you to quickly select a SharePoint location and the Web Drawing file type for saving your diagram.

Clicking on Save to SharePoint at the bottom of the billboard opens the Save As dialog so you can confirm or refine your selection.

To use the default publishing options, press Save. You now have a diagram ready for viewing in the browser!

By default, Visio automatically opens a browser so you can see your diagram as others will see it in the browser. You can turn off this behavior from the Save As dialog.

You can also click on Options at the bottom of the Save As dialog to launch the Publish Settings dialog. Using this dialog, you can select the pages that display and, for data connected diagrams, the data sources that refresh in the browser.

Visio Services allows you to refresh data-driven diagrams in the browser to present the most up-to-date view of the underlying data. The data sources selected in the Publish Settings dialog will be the data sources that refresh. Visio Services supports refreshing the following data sources:

• SQL Tables & Views
• WSS Lists
• Excel Workbooks hosted in SharePoint
• Generic OLEDB/ODBC data sources

In addition to giving you the option to customize your publish options, the Publish Settings dialog also indicates publishing issues. For example, in the image above, the data source titled “Sales data” has a warning icon beside it. This sales data is stored in a local Excel Workbook: this data source is not supported by Visio Services because it is stored on a local machine. If you want the data from an Excel Workbook to refresh with Visio Services, you should save the workbook to a SharePoint site, link your diagram to the workbook on SharePoint and then save your diagram to the SharePoint site.

On save, Microsoft Visio 2010 generates a Web Drawing file which is in fact a package containing:

1. the native Visio representation of the diagram (a .VSD file), used to edit the file in Visio, and
2. meta data re-generated on each save, used by Visio Services to render the web drawing in the browser.

Once your Visio Web Drawing file is saved to SharePoint, you can continue to work with it in Visio. Visio Professional 2010 and Visio Premium 2010 both fully support Visio Web Drawing files. This means that you can edit Visio Web Drawing files using the complete set of features provided by Visio.

As you try out Visio Services, please let us know what you think, either by commenting on the blog or via Send a Smile.

Introducing Visio Services

Last week at the SharePoint Conference, the Visio team unveiled Visio Services – a new feature of SharePoint 2010 that extends the reach of diagrams considerably. In a nutshell, Visio Services lets you:

• View diagrams in the browser without needing Visio on your machine
• Refresh data-driven diagrams in the browser
• Integrate diagrams into SharePoint applications

Let’s take a look in more detail at the features behind each of these scenarios.

Viewing diagrams in the browser

A Visio diagram, saved to a SharePoint document library as a Visio Web Drawing (a *.VDW file) using Visio Professional 2010 or Visio Premium 2010, can be viewed in any web browser by simply clicking on its file entry in the document library.

The diagram renders in full fidelity in the browser if the person viewing the diagram has Silverlight installed on their machine or as a PNG if not; Visio Services renders seamlessly anything you can draw in Visio. Take a look below to get a feel for the experience:

Visio Services enables you to navigate diagrams using easy to use and familiar metaphors for panning, zooming, switching pages, following hyperlinks and discovering shape data. You can also open any Visio Web Drawing in Visio using the “Open in Visio” button. Note that the person viewing the diagram can do so:

• …in any browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari etc…)
• …on any platform
• …without leaving the browser
• …without installing Visio, the Viewer or the Drawing Control
• …without needing to accept multiple dialogs or browser warnings

Also note that because the diagrams are stored in SharePoint document libraries, diagram creators get a variety of useful document management features from SharePoint such as diagram access control using permissions, diagram change tracking using versioning and the ability to attach diagrams to SharePoint workflows.

Refreshing data-driven diagrams

Visio Services has ported Visio’s data connectivity features to the browser! In case you’re not familiar with those features please take a look at “Show it like it is: connect data to your Visio diagram” for a quick summary. Note this demonstration is in done in Visio 2007, but these features are also available in Visio 2010.

In a nutshell, before Visio Services renders a data-driven diagram it fetches the diagram's linked data from an external data source and updates diagram visuals accordingly. Note that once posted to SharePoint, your diagram is a living document that will always represent the current state of your data visually. You never need to update manually again!

Visio Services supports refreshing diagrams connected to one or more of the following data sources:

• SQL (using either Kerberos, Single Sign On & Unattended Authentication)
• SharePoint Lists
• Excel Workbooks hosted in SharePoint
• Any OLEDB/ODBC data sources that have recent drivers

If the data source you plan to connect your diagrams to isn’t in the list above, don’t worry: Visio Services supports “Custom Data Providers” which enable you, with a few lines of code, to wrap your existing data source into one that Visio Services can consume. We’ll talk about writing your own “Custom Data Provider” in subsequent blog posts.

Finally, note that Visio Services supports refresh on open, user-triggered refresh as well as automatic periodic refresh.

Integrating Visio diagrams into SharePoint Applications

Visio Services also enables you to embed Visio Web Drawings, regardless of whether they are static or dynamic, into SharePoint applications. Depending on your skill level with web technologies there are three ways of doing so:

The main take-away is that with very little effort you can add visualization to your dashboards and with a bit more page authoring or some coding you can add rich interactivity between Visio Services and other components on the page. For those of you hungry for details, we’ll be delving into the details of all of these integration features in future blog posts.

How it all works

For the curious among you, here’s a recap of the architecture of Visio Services:

Availability and Requirements

Visio Services is scheduled to ship as part of the SharePoint Services 2010 ECAL and will be available in the up-and-coming Beta and RTM releases of SharePoint in both hosted and non-hosted flavors.

In Conclusion

The complete breadth of Visio diagrams can now be shared and refreshed in SharePoint, regardless of whether the person viewing them has Visio installed on their machine. What’s more you can now integrate rich data visualizations into SharePoint dashboards and applications with little effort.

There is much, much more to tell you about this brave new world of browser-based data visualization called Visio Services… but for now, we’ll let you digest this high level overview and start thinking about how browser-based data visualization using Visio Services can be useful to your organization. Stay tuned to the blog, we should have instructions on how to set-up Visio Services and how to create Visio Web Drawings in the next few weeks.

As you try out Visio Services, please let us know what you think, either by commenting on the blog or via Send a Smile.

Visio 2010 Beta coming soon…

It’s been several months since the Technical Preview was released and we started talking about Visio 2010 on this blog.  The product team has been hard at work responding to your feedback, fixing bugs and polishing the application.  Next month we are scheduled to release the Visio 2010 Beta, which will be open to the public.  If you haven’t had the opportunity to try Visio 2010 for yourself, this is your chance.

Sometimes it’s hard to wait patiently for new software releases, so to put your mind at ease we’ve created a special alert system that will notify you when you can download the Beta.  Head over to http://visiotoolbox.com/2010/ and click on the big green button.  You’ll also find a handy diagram explaining the software delivery process (approximately) and several other pages highlighting some of the new capabilities of Visio 2010 and Visio Services.

Using a Visio Process Repository

We frequently speak with Visio users whose organizations need to manage collections of process diagrams. Many of these users are employing basic methods such as storing these documents on network file shares. However, these methods leave much to be desired. For instance, end users frequently ask us questions like:

• How can I make sure I’m always editing the most recent version of a process diagram?
• How can I find out about updates made to the process diagrams that interest me?

Additionally, the administrators and managers who supervise these document repositories often ask us questions like:

• How can I monitor whether my organization’s diagrams comply with our internal standards?
• How can I easily find all processes that involve a particular department?

To address the above pain points, we have created the Visio Process Repository, a new SharePoint site template that is available out of the box with SharePoint 2010. It leverages SharePoint’s collaboration features -- including check-in and check-out, versioning, and workflow -- and integrates with several of Visio’s new process management features. The result is that in just a few clicks, a SharePoint administrator can create a Visio Process Repository that is pre-configured for easy storage and management of Visio process diagrams.

Here is the home page of an example Process Repository:

As shown in the sidebar above, a Repository site contains a library for documentation, a task list, and a discussion board. But most important is the “Process Diagrams” document library, which is designed to store processes. This document library comes pre-populated with several templates that can be used to create new process diagrams. (However, you can store other diagram types in a Repository; these particular templates are available simply for convenience.)

Let’s say you use the Cross-Functional Flowchart template to create the following diagram in Visio:

Once you’re finished and (optionally) have checked your diagram for errors using the Validation feature, you can save your document back to the Repository through the “Save to SharePoint” billboard in the Backstage:

Then, when you navigate back to your Repository, your process diagram will be listed in the Process Diagrams document library as shown in the image below. Note the two special columns marked by the red rectangles:

• The Keywords column displays the swimlane headings of each cross-functional flowchart in the document library. The diagram above had swimlanes titled “Engineering” and “Management”; these swimlanes are reflected in the document library below, providing useful at-a-glance information on who is involved in the process.
• The Category column displays the validation status of each document. This makes it easier for administrators and managers to monitor whether the processes in their Repository conform to their organization’s standards.

Since the Process Repository is built on top of SharePoint 2010, you can also take advantage of other SharePoint features. For instance, you can configure workflows, set up automatic email notifications for when documents change, and view revision history for a given document. Also, with Visio Services users can view the processes in their browser in a single click, even if they do not have Visio installed on their computers. For instance, this is what the above cross-functional flowchart looks like when viewed in a browser:

We hope this quick tour of the Visio Process Repository feature gives you ideas for how you can use a Process Repository (as well as related Visio 2010 features like Validation and Visio Services) in your organization. Please let us know what you think, either by commenting on the blog or via Send a Smile.

Announcing SharePoint 2010 and Visio Services

Yesterday Microsoft released details about SharePoint 2010 at the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas.  SharePoint 2010 is a major release, covering a tremendous array of collaboration capabilities.  You can read the overview on the SharePoint team blog.  A notable feature in SharePoint 2010 is Visio Services.  Here is the summary of Visio Services from our original description of the Visio 2010 release:

Visio 2010 can take data-refreshable diagrams and publish them to SharePoint for broad distribution to anyone with a web browser. Visio Services performs data refresh and rendering on the server and delivers up-to-date diagrams in the browser. The diagram author no longer needs to repost the diagram every time the data changes, and diagram viewers no longer need the Visio client to see the diagram.

Beyond simply viewing the latest version of a diagram in the browser, Visio Services enables interactive dashboards or mash-ups.  You can show a Visio diagram in a web part and define interactions between the diagram and other web parts on a page.  For example, in the image above, selecting a computer shape in the diagram will display detailed information about that computer on the right side.  Additionally, choosing one of the radio buttons on the right side will select the shapes in the diagram that match that criteria.

The Visio team is showing Visio Services in depth at the SharePoint Conference this week.  Initial feedback from the conference attendees has been quite positive.  We’ll have a lot more Visio Services information to share on the blog next week, but there are other ways that Visio integrates with SharePoint 2010.  Coming up this week we look at one example.

Data Graphics Legends in Visio 2010

Many of you are familiar with the work we did in Visio 2007 to make it easier to surface data that exists in your diagram in a visual form. Data graphics allow you to add refreshable data visualizations to the shapes in your diagram. See our previous posts Microsoft Office Visio 2007 Released and Customizing Data Graphics for more information.

No data	Data graphics!

One thing users have asked us for is a way to describe the data graphics used in the diagram – a legend. Visio 2010 adds the ability to insert a legend that documents the data bars, icon sets and color by values in data graphics applied to shapes on the page. You can do this using the Insert Legend button on the Data tab.

Visio creates the legend at the upper right corner of the page. The legend contains a separate section for each data field referenced in the data graphics’ definitions. The descriptions for each legend item are obtained from the data graphics.

The legend is customizable, so you can add, remove and rename sections and shapes to make the legend look just right for your particular diagram. Legends also pick up the theme applied to the page, or they can be manually formatted.

The legend is made up of a number of shapes and uses containers to keep the different parts of the legend organized. The top-most shape is a list, a special type of container that arranges its members in a regular, linear pattern. The members of that list are containers, each of which represents a data field from the data graphics. Inside each container is another list, this one invisible, which keeps the individual legend items neatly arranged.

You can select a legend item and use the arrow keys on your keyboard to reorder them, or you can drag them around the list. You can also drag them out, delete them or drag your own shapes in. The same can be done with the containers that correspond to each data field. If you click the blue insert arrow on the outer list, Visio adds an empty container for your own use. While this will not have the inner list, you are free to add any shapes you wish.

To preserve the customizations you might make to the legend, Visio does not update it as you edit your data graphics or change which data graphics are applied to shapes on the page. Simply insert a new legend once you are done making changes. Delete the existing one or move it out of the way if you need to bring anything over.

Finally, for the developers out there, you can drop a legend using Page.DropLegend in the Visio API and specify custom outer list and field container masters.

We’re happy to be able to close this gap in data visualization and are interested in your feedback via Send a Smile or a comment here on the blog.

Data Graphics in Visio 2010

In Visio 2007, we introduced the data graphics feature to make it possible to display data on shapes using text callouts, data bars, or icons, or by coloring the shapes based on the data. As the data changes, the data graphics update accordingly.

With data graphics, Visio diagrams can be used to visualize dynamic data in powerful and succinct ways. For example, data graphics are used on these network server shapes to show their network name, operating system, and IP address as text callouts that appear next to them. Data bars show CPU speed and memory, and an icon is used to indicate each server’s current status. The data associated with each shape can be conveyed at a glance.

In Visio 2010, we’ve given the data graphics feature a makeover to integrate it into the ribbon and to address feedback we heard from users. We also added a legend feature, but we’ll talk about that in an upcoming post.

As in Visio 2007, before you can display data using a data graphic, you first need to have some data in your shapes. You can add the data manually in the Shape Data Window for each shape, or you can import the data into the diagram from an external data source like an Excel worksheet or a SQL database, using the Link Data to Shapes button on the Data tab. The data will appear in the External Data Window.

Once you drag a row of data from the External Data Window onto a shape to establish the link to the shape, a set of data graphics is created in the Data Graphics gallery, which replaces the task pane used in Visio 2007. The first data graphic in the gallery is automatically applied to the data-linked shape.

You can also create a new data graphic or edit one of the data graphics that Visio built for you in the gallery.

In addition to integrating the user interface into the ribbon, we made some improvements to the dialog boxes based on user feedback. First, if you want to change the way a data field is displayed in the data graphic, you no longer have to delete the data field item and add a new one. For example, if you want to make an item display as an icon instead of a text callout, you can simply edit the item…

…and switch its display type from Text…

…to Icon Set.

When you edit a data graphic, we now give you a choice between applying the changes to all shapes with that data graphic applied (the only option in Visio 2007) or only to the selected shapes, using radio buttons at the bottom of the Edit Data Graphic dialog box. The latter choice makes a copy of the data graphic and applies it to the selected shapes.

Visio 2007 users asked us for more control over the formatting of text and other elements in data graphics. In Visio 2010, you can choose the font size used for the value and label in a text callout or data bar, and you can specify the width of the callout.

Live Rendering Shapes in Visio 2010

For several releases Visio has enhanced the appearance of shapes in diagrams by adding isometric projections or themes with gradients and shadows.  All the while, their appearance in the Shapes Window has been unchanged.  The 32x32 pixel icons have been limited to 16 colors (reminiscent of the EGA color palette  from 1984).  Thus the Shapes Window icons have not kept pace with the visual updates on the drawing surface.

Visio 2010 remedies that with a feature called Live Rendering.  We briefly mentioned this feature in the Shapes Window article, but we’ll go a little deeper here. Live Rendering replaces a shape’s icon with an image of what the shape actually will look like on the page.  You can see the full color spectrum used in the gradient fills.  You can see the anti-aliasing applied to the geometry and text.  If there is currently a theme applied to the page, Visio will even show the shape with the theme applied.  What you see is what you get.

Supporting Live Rendering in Your Custom Shapes

Live Rendering is also available for any of your own custom shapes.  Visio 2010 takes the existing setting for automatically generating icons for shapes and repurposes it as a setting for Live Rendering.  If you right-click on one of your own shapes in the Shapes Window and choose Edit Master > Master Properties, you can see the revised property.

Of course, Live Rendering may not be the best option for every shape.  Perhaps you prefer the icon to be more of an abstraction than a realistic portrayal of the shape.  Sometimes the shape has so much detail that it is not understandable in 32x32 pixels.  Maybe the shape is oblong and does not scale down to a 1:1 aspect ratio well.  In these cases it is best to stick with the shape icon, which is still limited to 16 colors in order to maintain file compatibility with previous releases.

Custom Crop Regions

However, there is a common situation that we felt was important to support with Live Rendering.  Sometimes only a portion of a shape is visually distinct from other shapes in the same stencil.  After all, shapes that are found in the same stencil are probably related, so they may share some common visual attributes.  In these cases the distinction may be too small to be useful when displaying the shapes as icons.  To alleviate this problem, Live Rendering supports custom crop regions.  Instead of rendering the full extents of a shape and shrinking that to icon size, Visio can render a specific region of a shape and use that for the icon.

Let’s see an example from the shapes in Visio 2010’s SharePoint Workflow content.  There are dozens of workflow shapes that correspond to activities you can perform with SharePoint.  Each shape consists of a rectangle with a text label and a thumbnail image.

You can see that the thumbnails are the most visually distinctive part of the shapes.  What happens when you put these in the Shapes Window and turn on Live Rendering?  Unfortunately the details are lost.  In prior releases your only option would be to manually draw an icon using the 16 color palette and live with a very poor representation of the shape.  With a custom crop region, Visio only displays the relevant portion of the shape.

A custom crop region is specified by adding a User-defined cell to the Pagesheet of the master shape in the Master Edit Window.  Add a cell named User.msvPreviewIconCropToPage and set the value to 1.  Then modify the size of the page and the position of the shape on the page such that only the portion of the shape you want rendered overlaps the page.  You can look at the masters for the SharePoint Workflow shapes or the Callouts for more examples.

Live Rendering shapes in the Shapes Window is an important part of the overall user interface update in Visio 2010.  For shape designers, Live Rendering and custom crop regions provide new opportunities for showcasing your rich, graphical content.  Please let us know what you think by using the Send a Smile feedback tool or commenting on the blog.

Annotating Diagrams with Callouts in Visio 2010

One of the guiding principles for the Visio 2010 user interface is that commonly used shapes should be easily accessible.  We showed how the Quick Shapes view in the Shapes Window aggregates the shapes from multiple stencils together.  There are also common shapes that are useful in many different kinds of diagrams.  These are exposed directly in the Ribbon through shape galleries.  We looked at Containers and Backgrounds and Borders previously.  In this post we examine Callouts.

A callout is an annotation on a diagram that provides more information about a shape.  Callouts are Visio shapes themselves, which differentiates them from other forms of annotation such as comments.  Callouts are part of the visible drawing and can be edited and formatted like any other shape.  A callout points at or references another shape, which we call the “target” of the callout.  It is placed in proximity its target and may have a line connecting to it.  The connecting line is called a “leader”.

To add a callout shape in Visio 2010, select the target shape on the page and then click on the Callout dropdown in the Insert tab.  You will see the Callout gallery with many different styles of callouts.  Hover over a style to see it applied as a Live Preview and then click the style to add the callout.  The callout appears slightly above and right of the target shape.  (Note in the Technical Preview build the callout is placed a little too close by default and overlaps the target.  This will be corrected in the next beta release.)

Callout shapes are not new to Visio 2010, but Visio 2010 gives callout shapes special behaviors.  When a target shape is moved, copied or deleted, any callouts attached to the shape will be moved, copied or deleted too.  Thus callouts stay with their target shapes, though you can reposition the callout to any offset from its target.  Callout shapes are also designed to be displayed in front of other shapes.  Even if you add new shapes to a page and overlap them with callouts, the callouts will appear in front.

There are additional options for the visual style of callout shapes, which you can access by right-clicking on a callout.  The Callout Style flyout menu allows you to switch to a different geometric style and has the same choices as the Insert Callout gallery in the ribbon.  The Orientation flyout menu lets you control which side the callout’s leader attaches to.  Callout Line controls the visibility and placement of the leader line.  Finally you can choose whether the callout shape resizes to fit the amount of text in the shape.

We hope you find the improved callout behaviors and convenient access from the ribbon a welcome addition to Visio 2010.  Feel free to tell us what you think through the Send a Smile feedback tool or by commenting on this post.

Automatic Page Sizing in Visio 2010

When you start a new diagram, you typically begin with a single drawing page that is the size of a standard piece of printer paper.  Many diagrams grow beyond the size of a single printed sheet.  Visio 2010 adds a dynamic page sizing capability that responds as you draw, so you no longer have to manually adjust your page size to your diagram.

As you draw beyond the edge of the current page, Visio expands the page in that direction by one additional tile, or printer paper sheet.

If you live preview adding a shape with AutoConnect, Visio also previews the tiles that will be added.  As you drag shapes outside the current page or drag shapes from the Shapes window, Visio shows a translucent preview of the new tiles that will be added if the shape is dropped in its current location.

All sorts of things can affect the size of your diagram when printed, including adding shapes, deleting shapes, moving shapes, adding or removing text and changing text properties.  Any of these will alert Visio to update the page larger or smaller to keep the drawing within full tiles.

Start with this:
Add more text:
Delete the shape:

You may also notice that the depiction of page breaks and margins is different than in Visio 2007.  We simplified the look of page breaks and many people will find them similar to Excel’s.  Margins are now a clear white area around the entire page.  We think you will find this much more clear than the grey bars in past versions of Visio.  We also enable showing page breaks and margins by default in new drawings, to help make it clear how Visio is adjusting your page.

This auto sizing behavior is controlled using the Auto Size toggle button on the Design tab.  If you click the dialog launcher and open the Page Setup dialog, you’ll see we replaced the now-defunct “Same as printer paper size” option with “Let Visio expand the page as needed”.  The sharp-eyed Visio expert will notice that the “Size to fit drawing contents” option is also gone from the dialog.  Since that item was more of a one-time action than a persistent state of tightly fitting the page to the diagram, we moved it to the Page Size dropdown and renamed it “Fit to Drawing”.

Since we’re talking about page sizing, it’s also worth taking a quick look at manual page adjustments.  The Orientation and Size dropdown buttons on the Design tab surface the most commonly-used items from the Page Setup dialog.

When Auto Size is enabled, these reflect the orientation and size of the printer paper (the tiles in the drawing page), because Auto Size controls the size of the page based on the printer paper settings.  Changing them changes the orientation and size of the printer paper settings.  If you change these, the number of tiles required to contain the diagram may also change, so your drawing page may change size.

Size = Letter (8.5” x 11”) Orientation = Landscape
Size = Letter (8.5” x 11”) Orientation = Portrait

When Auto Size is disabled, these reflect the orientation and size of the drawing page, because you are controlling it, not Visio.  Changing them sets both the drawing page and the printer paper settings, to keep them in sync.

Size = Letter (8.5” x 11”) Orientation = Landscape
Size = Letter (8.5” x 11”) Orientation = Portrait

Essentially, we made Orientation and Size work as expected depending on context – whether Auto Size is on or off.  That is, whether you have Visio taking care of the page size or if you are doing it.

We hope these additions will help you to more easily, and more fluidly, build and edit your diagrams.  As usual, send us any feedback you have using Send a Smile or through a comment on the blog.

Inserting and Deleting Shapes in Visio 2010

Diagram maintenance is a task that everyone performs, and many users spend much of their time in Visio maintaining existing diagrams.  We realize that a fair amount of the time you spend maintaining your diagrams is spent in the mechanics of the task, rather than achieving the goals of updating the concept the diagram represents.  There are some clear gains we can effect to make your life easier as you go about editing your diagrams.

Consider a typical flowchart.  You documented an internal process and now need to add some steps to the process diagram.  Prior to Visio 2010, this meant facing what could be a tedious task of ungluing connectors, selecting and dragging shapes to make room for the new ones, adding the new ones, positioning them neatly, re-gluing connectors, adding new connectors and moving the other shapes into position to leave you with a nice, neat diagram.

In Visio 2010, as part of our focus on ease of use and improving core process diagramming, we have simplified this basic, repeated task dramatically.  Now, all you need to do is drag your new shape out and drop it on the connector you wish to split.  Visio highlights the endpoints of the connector to make it clear which connector will split.  When you drop, Visio moves all the “downstream” shapes over just enough to make room for the new shape.  Visio takes care of positioning the new shape so that it is aligned with and evenly spaced from the shape upstream from it.

Before:
Hover:
After:

Visio identifies which shapes are “downstream” from the insertion point, moves them in the right direction the right amount and places the new shape in just the right spot.  The lower left rectangle is connected downstream from the inserted shape, but is to its left, so did not need to move.

At some point you may need to remove a few steps from your diagram.  Prior to Visio 2010, this meant deleting shapes, deleting excess connectors, re-gluing the remaining connectors to the remaining shapes and moving those shapes to align and space evenly with the rest of the diagram.

In Visio 2010, we take care of the connector healing for you.  When you delete a connected shape, Visio checks how many connectors go into and out of the shape, and which ones have text.  If it is clear how to re-glue the connectors without changing the diagram and which connectors can be removed without losing text, Visio deletes the extraneous connectors and re-glues the remainder.

We made an explicit decision not to move the remaining shapes to fill in the empty space, as that could easily lead to all those downstream shapes – which could be numerous – overlapping another part of the diagram.  Fortunately, you can simply select which shapes should tighten up and use Auto Align or Auto Space to help you neaten up the diagram.  As you can see above, we also preserve connectors that have text, even when that means not healing.  Text on connectors is important, so better safe than sorry.

As mentioned, we enabled this behavior for cases where we can make a safe conclusion about how the connectors should heal.  Other than to prevent losing text, when else don’t we try to heal?  If there is more than one connector coming into and going out of the shape being deleted, then it is ambiguous how all the shapes should be re-connected together.  Typical examples of this are shown below.

Our hope is that these additions, while seemingly small, will have a big impact on reducing your workload as you maintain the millions of Visio diagrams you have all created.  Let us know how this works for you using Send a Smile or through a comment on the blog.

The Visio 2010 Connectivity API

Our previous post on AutoConnect in Visio 2010 discussed how Visio 2010 makes it simpler and faster for end users to create connected diagrams such as flowcharts. Many developers will be pleased to hear that Visio 2010 also brings greatly simplified utilities for working with connected diagrams programmatically. The Visio 2010 API contains new methods that let developers manipulate and traverse connected diagrams or graphs at a higher level of abstraction than previously, which can result in greater programmer productivity and more concise, readable code.

In this blog post, we will introduce the new Visio 2010 methods used for working with connected diagrams. Then we will see these methods in action by doing a visual walk-through of a program that manipulates a flowchart. (The source code and diagram used below are also available for download here.)

New connectivity methods in Visio 2010

For each of the following API methods, we give a brief description on what the method does, along with an explanation of the method’s arguments. This is not meant to be a complete reference; the forthcoming Visio 2010 SDK will contain much more complete documentation on these methods.

Shape.ConnectedShapes(Flags, CategoryFilter)

Returns an array of identifiers (IDs) of shapes that are one degree of separation away from the given shape (i.e. separated by a 1-D connector).

Arguments:

• Flags: Filters the list of returned shape IDs by the directionality of the connectors.
• CategoryFilter: Filters the list of returned shape IDs by limiting it to IDs of shapes that match the specified category. A shape’s categories can be found in the User.msvShapeCategories cell of its ShapeSheet.

Shape.GluedShapes(Flags, CategoryFilter, pOtherConnectedShape)

Returns an array of identifiers for the shapes that are glued to a shape. For instance, if the given shape is a 2-D shape that has multiple connectors attached to it, this method would return the IDs of those connectors. If the given shape is a connector, this method would return the IDs of the shapes to which its ends are glued.

Arguments:

• Flags: Specifies dimensionality and directionality of connectors of shapes returned.
• CategoryFilter: Specifies category of shapes returned.
• pOtherConnectedShape: Optional additional shape to which returned shapes must also be glued

Page.DropConnected(ObjectToDrop, TargetShape, PlacementDir, [Connector])

Creates a new Shape object on the page, places the new shape relative to the specified existing target shape, and adds a connector from the existing shape to the new shape. Returns the newly created shape. This feature parallels the AutoConnect feature in the Visio user interface.

Arguments:

• ObjectToDrop: The shape to be added to the page
• TargetShape: The existing shape from which to align, space, and connect
• PlacementDir: The direction from TargetShape in which to place ObjectToDrop
• Connector: The connector to use (optional). This overrides usage of the default Dynamic Connector.

Page.SplitConnector(ConnectorToSplit, Shape)

Splits the specified connector with the specified shape. Returns the new, duplicated connector.

Arguments:

• ConnectorToSplit: The connector to split. Must be a routable 1-D connector.
• Shape: The shape to use to split the connector. Must be a 2-D shape.

Shape.Disconnect(ConnectorEnd, OffsetX, OffsetY, Units)

Unglues the specified connector end points and offsets them the specified amount from the shapes they were joined to.

Arguments:

• ConnectorEnd: The end of the connector to disconnect
• OffsetX: The x-distance that the connector end is moved away from the shape
• OffsetY: The y-distance that the connector end is moved away from the shape
• Units: The units of measure for the assigned offset values

Page.AutoConnectMany(FromShapeIDs(), ToShapeIDs(), PlacementDirs(), [Connector])

Automatically draws multiple connections in the specified directions between the specified shapes. Returns the number of shapes connected.

Arguments:

• FromShapeIDs(): An array of identifers of the shapes from which to draw a connection
• ToShapeIDs(): An array of identifers of the shapes to which to draw a connection
• PlacementDirs(): An array of constants that represent the directions in which to draw the connection
• Connector: The connector to use (optional). This overrides usage of the default Dynamic Connector.

Let’s try it out!

Here is a screenshot of a Visio drawing we will be manipulating and traversing:

Using a few of the above listed methods, we’ll add to this flowchart and traverse it. Each step along the way, we’ll show you the corresponding line of C# code along with a screenshot of the change it caused.

Note: In the below code snippets, page refers to the active drawing page, and the Visio namespace is an abbreviation of Microsoft.Office.Interop.Visio. The meanings of most other variables should be apparent from the context.

First, let's split the connector that currently connects "Start Event" to "Task" and insert a Sub-Process shape. We can access that connector using the GluedShapes method. Once we’ve accessed the connector, we use SplitConnector to split it.

Array shapesGluedToStartEvent =
    startEvent.GluedShapes(Visio.VisGluedShapesFlags.visGluedShapesOutgoing1D, "", null);
// In this example, the above array has 1 element. Let's get that element.
int splittableConnectorID = (int)shapesGluedToStartEvent.GetValue(0);
Visio.Shape splittableConnector = page.Shapes.get_ItemFromID(splittableConnectorID);
page.SplitConnector(splittableConnector, subprocessMaster);

This yields the following result:

Let's say we want to programmatically access the "Task" shape. If we have a reference to "Start Event", we can access "Task" by traversing across "Sub-Process", using ConnectedShapes.

Array shapesConnectedToByStartEvent =
    startEvent.ConnectedShapes(Visio.VisConnectedShapesFlags.visConnectedShapesOutgoingNodes, "");
// In this example, the above array has 1 element. Let's get that element.
int subProcessID = (int)shapesConnectedToByStartEvent.GetValue(0);
Visio.Shape subProcess = page.Shapes.get_ItemFromID(subProcessID);

// Repeating the same action as above to get from "Sub-Process" to "Task".
Array shapesConnectedToBySubProcess =
    subProcess.ConnectedShapes(Visio.VisConnectedShapesFlags.visConnectedShapesOutgoingNodes, "");
int taskID = (int)shapesConnectedToBySubProcess.GetValue(0);
Visio.Shape task = page.Shapes.get_ItemFromID(taskID);

Now let's use DropConnected to drop an End Event shape onto the page and have "Task" connect to it. We use the default connector, so the last argument can be null.

Visio.Shape endEvent = page.DropConnected(endEventMaster,
    task,
    Visio.VisAutoConnectDir.visAutoConnectDirRight,
    null);

This yields the following result:

We hope this walk-through was a helpful illustration of Visio 2010’s new API utilities for working with connected diagrams. This article covers only a small part of the enhancements made to Visio’s API for the 2010 release; more information will come in future posts on this blog, and with the release of the Visio 2010 SDK.

We’re interested to hear what developers think of this API functionality, so please use the Send a Smile feedback tool or leave a comment below.