Add VBA Project to Visio Document by Using Code

Question

I've been asked to create a macro to update a few hundred or so Visio drawings, and keep them updated.

The update involves putting all objects of a certain type on their own layer - simple.

Now, this is easy enough to do, but when a user adds a new object some time in the future it will likely be on a default layer. So I had hoped to be able to include a VBA macro which is triggered by the Save event to re-assign objects to their layers. The problem here is that I'd need to include this macro in every document since Visio doesn't have an application level VBA project.

Is there any way to introduce a VBA project to ALL Visio documents using code (VBA or otherwise)?? Or is there an alternative I might not have considered? Unfortunately an Add-in is not really an option due to available resources.

Answer 1

You have a couple options here:

1. Force every user to allow programmatic access to the VBA project for their documents, and use VBA automation to add code. This works nicely when you have programmatic access, but this can be difficult to assure.
2. If you're not using Visio 2013, you can actually save a document as VDX (xml) and replace the data for the VBA project with your own (you'd save out a document as VDX manually, and copy out the chunk of data for the VBA project). As I said, this wouldn't work with Visio 2013 since they seem to have eliminated the VDX format. You probably can get away with something similar with the VSDX XML format for 2013.
3. You can 'migrate' everyone's documents to a new VST file you provide. This would just involve copying and pasting all the content from a document into the new document that has your code in it. You have to be careful though to make sure all the document- and page-level data comes along, too (meaning DocumentSheet and PageSheet and any Document XML properties that may be important, and attributes like Author, Description, etc...)

Item 1 is the easiest, aside from the pain getting programmatic access to VBA Projects, unless you can have people send you documents to migrate.