Visio 2013: How to trigger a change in databinding of all shapes

Question

I have a nice process overview for our ordering process in Visio. I have an external data source (SQL Server), which works fine. Every record in my data source represents one ordering process. Currently all my shapes of the process are linked to the first record of the data source.

Now I want to add a dynamic behavior. What I want to achieve is this:

• A user provides the order reference in a textbox (order reference is a column in the data source)
• Afterwards the user clicks a button
• After the button click, the process is updated and all shapes are now linked to the external data source record, that matches the provided order reference

So in short: the user should be able to select which process that needs to be visualized.

I assume that this is common functionality, but I don't see how I can deal with this requirement. I've searched already some days on this issue, but without any success.

Can you help me with this issue? Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

Problem solved :-)

Some old school VBA was required. Using the DataRecordSet object did the trick. It contains a method GetDataRowIDs that you can use to query the external dataset. Once you have the record to visualize, it's just a matter of dynamically updating the shapes with the correct record. Use macro recording to see how to do this.

MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ms195694(v=office.12).aspx