Advanced Visio Searching

[Jonathan]

We have a file share with 1000s of vsd file and I want to build a simple very
basic index. I have a set of pattern matching criteria I want to run against
all vsd files in this share to catpture particulare text strings within the
vsd diagram. Then I want this string and the UNC name of the file to be
output to some other output file, excel would be nice but a txt file would
also work.

For example if I was search for the name Jon in a vsd doc the output would
show: -

Jon c:\visio docs\structure chart.vsd

I'm using this in a far more technical context but the example sums up my
requirements.

Any ideas please guys?

I could script this quite easily if I could find a CLI tool that could
search the txt strings in a visio. If you know of such a tool that could help!

 

[John Goldsmith_Visio_MVP]

Hello Jonathan,

I'm not clear on where you'll be targeting your text search (in custom
properties / shape data, shape text, document properties etc.), but you
could have a look at the 'RunThroughAllFilesInAFolder' code in this post and
see if that helps:

http://visualsignals.typepad.co.uk/vislog/2007/11/looping-through.html

There's also some handy code over here: http://visio.mvps.org/VBA.htm.
Checkout:

'Custom Properties'
'Directory Process'
'LoopThroughFiles'

Hope that helps.

Best regards

John


John Goldsmith (Visio MVP)
www.visualSignals.typepad.co.uk
www.visualSignals.co.uk

 

[Jonathan]

John,

Thanks for taking the time to make your suggestions and I'm sure there is
some value here but after contemplating learning VB for the past couple of
days I must ask if there is a simple CLI tool that will display the object
properties of all objects within a Viso document back to the command line.

That way I can do my correlation easily. It must be possable to search the
contents of a viso as my workstations windows XP search function finds a
string in a visio document. The only changes I need is to subsitute the
search string for a regex and be able to save the hit strings and file
locations to a log file. Easily done with batch scripting if only I could
find a way to output this attribute data as clear text on the CLI.

To mis-quote a famous sc-fi feature film: -
Help me John Goldsmith.... you are my only hope! )

Thanks

 

[David J Parker [MVP Visio]]

You don't say what version of Visio?
See if this helps:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...09-448b-4386-b901-efea29cac808&displaylang=en

 

[Jonathan]

Sorry, the version of visio I am using is 2003. I have the rest of the 2003
office software installed as well.

Your filter pushed me so close to the answer!!!

I was playing around with the Windows Indexing Serivce and created my own
index for the Visio file repository we have. I can use the Indexing Service
Query Form to search the index using regular expressions! However for the
results to be valid for me I must be able to view the pattern that was
matched in the regex search against the file path....... this method only
returns the file name. So close but so far (