A crazy cross functional flowchart question...

[Mike]

Sorry if I am asking a simple question, I am a sharepoint developer and new
to using visio, however so far it seems I am doing good and learning fast.
One thing I cannot figure out though, is the cross functional flowchart
diagram.

I need to do these programatically:

1. Add a flowchart to a page. However... this I couldnt figure out, theres
the popup box which I cant figure out how to remove! I edited the 'functional
band' shape, found out what shape was creating this popup to appear but can't
find out why it causes the popup to set up a flowchart appears.

I found a workaround by just making a visio file that my program will open
by default with one already created.

MY NEW PROBLEM

is that I need to make X amount of pages depending on an array in my
program, but with the functional chart in there now, it does a pop-up for
every new page created!!!! (Click ok to copy the functional bands from the
current page to....).

***Is there no way I can edit the functionality of this 'add in' or
programatically suppress or answer these popups?***

Couple of things I found but dont understand.

On the flowchart band masters shape there is an eventdrop with
'RUNADDON("CFF")'. I cant find CFF in the addons. When I remove it in visio
shapesheet, it seems to have no effect still.

The vss is XFUNCH_U.VSS. Is there any way I can edit this file in a way to
solve my issue?

Sorry for the long post, I pushed to use current visio functionality (of
course) over remaking a flowchart.

 

[Paul Herber]

On the flowchart band masters shape there is an eventdrop with
'RUNADDON("CFF")'. I cant find CFF in the addons. When I remove it in visio
shapesheet, it seems to have no effect still.

A quick response to part of your question:
the addon is called XFUNC.DLL

 

[Mark Nelson [MS]]

Hi Mike,

Since you are new to Visio development, you may not be aware of a few things
here. First, the Visio product consists of a drawing engine, a lot of
content (shapes, stencils and templates) and add-ons. The drawing engine
exposes an API which you can use to do all kinds of things with Visio
diagrams. Add-ons enhance Visio's basic functionality by providing
specialized behavior and UI for specific diagram types. In fact a lot of
the "features" you see in Visio diagrams are provided by these add-ons. The
add-ons use the same API to interact with Visio as your solution can.

The catch is that the add-ons themselves do not expose API's, making it hard
to extend their custom behaviors even further. In your case the
Cross-Functional Flowchart diagram consists of custom shapes in the
XFUNCH_U.VSS stencil and an add-on named CFF. Here's an example of what
this means. It's simple enough to add a shape to a CFF diagram using the
Visio API, but it is not so easy to make sure that shape gets placed into a
specific swimlane. Swimlanes and swimlane membership is managed by the
add-on, not by the Visio drawing engine. Thus there is no convenient API
method to do this.

The choice for developers is whether it is worth trying to integrate with an
add-on backed diagram or whether it is best to avoid other add-ons and
create a separate diagram. It depends on your scenario. If you do need to
integrate with the existing diagram type and add-on, you will have to
familiarize yourself with the shapes involved and the ways that they invoke
or get controlled by the add-on. It can be complicated, though CFF is not
as bad as some diagram types in terms of add-on integration.

Here a couple of pointers based on your questions:
- The initial dialog you see in the diagram is triggered by the add-on,
which is invoked from a Persisted Event in the diagram template. Try
running the Persisted Event tool in the Visio SDK to see and modify these.
- Many times (but not always) you can use the Application.AlertResponse
property to suppress message boxes that appear in the UI. I haven't tried
this on the CFF dialog to see if it helps. It might work better on the
messages you see after inserting new pages.
- Shapes that are controlled by add-ons often make a RunAddon call in the
EventDrop cell. CFF uses this to initialize the add-on if you happen to
drop the shape into a diagram that did not have the Persisted Event in it.
However, most add-ons listen to events to know when a shape is dropped, so
eliminating the RunAddon may have little effect.

I hope this gives you a better feel for the problem space as well as some
direct answers to issues.

--
Mark Nelson
Office Graphics - Visio
Microsoft Corporation

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