Visio Web Access Web Part connection for highlighting shapes uses auto-generated shape name

Question

I've recently been working on creating a visio web drawing with our office floorplan so that employees can search for other employees and find where they sit. I display the floorplan in visio using the Visio Web Access web part and then I connect it to a custom webpart with a dropdown that contains a list of our employees.

The employees are stored in a list which I have linked into the Visio drawing so that each employee is associated with a shape (a "Space" in this case). I've changed the title column of the list to be entitled "Name" so that when I link an item in the list with a shape it correctly sets the name property.

The problem is that when I send the name that they select from my custom webpart to the Visio Web Access web part it does not do anything. I learned from this article that the shape name that the Visio Web Access web part is wanting is not the actual "Name" property but an auto-generated property that shows up in the Shape Data window. This is auto-generated using the type of the shape and the order in which it was inserted into the drawing.

The problem is that we would now have to maintain not only the friendly shape name (the employee's name) but also this auto-generated name in our list of employees. This is not the ideal solution because we would like to have a non-IT admin maintain this seating chart information and it's not intuitive to have enter this random ID.

Is there any way to change this property to make it user-friendly or is it a read-only property?

Answer 1

Yes, in microsoft visio you will need to enable the developer tab (File->Options->Advanced->Developer Mode) after doing so you will get a developer tab which has a "shape name" button. Click the shape then click the button and you can change that property.