John Goldsmith's visLog

Visio 2010 – Save As Silverlight

Continuing my review of some of the new features in Visio 2010, today I’m going to look at some exciting functionality that enables you to save your diagrams out to Silverlight…

Extending Visio’s Save As Web zoom functionality

This post is in response to a newsgroup question about how to extend Visio’s Save As Web zoom limits and also, how to set a custom default zoom level as each page loads…

Save As Web URL Parameters

Ok, hands up – I’ve only recently realised that the URL parameters functionality in Visio Save As Web output work on straight .html pages and not just server based platforms such as ASP.NET. 

I’d tried this some time ago on a local machine (using the file:// URL schema) and had assumed, incorrectly, that as URL parameters weren’t recognised that this would be the same when hosted (via http://).  This is not the case and so I thought I’d try and set the record straight by reviewing how to use this handy part of the Save As Web addon…

Save As Web and IE8

I came across an issue recently with Visio’s Save As Web output and IE8.  Basically a JavaScript function, which had worked quite happily in IE6 and 7, now throws an error as the main page loads.

I believe this issue will be addressed in the next Office 2007 SP2, coming soon, but until then and for any legacy sites there’s a fairly quick fix…

Visio and Bing (Virtual Earth)

I've recently been involved in a WPF based project that utilises Microsoft Virtual Earth and I thought it would make an interesting exercise to combine this with Visio's Save As Web output.

I've uploaded a live demo over here that shows how clicking a shape, containing a latitude and longitude string, can update a Virtual Earth map embedded in the toolbar panel on the left hand side.

I'm not going to go into lots of detail about how to use Virtual Earth as the main purpose of this post is to demonstrate how to connect it to Visio web output, but if you want to find out more then here are a few links to get you going:

• Live Services - Microsoft Virtual Earth
• Virtual Earth Interactive SDK
• MSDN - Virtual Earth Map Control SDK 6.2

Changing the 'Save as Web' tooltip

A recent question in the newsgroups has set me looking at the way in which Visio's Save as Web addon handles hyperlink tooltips.

The original poster pointed out that in the 2002 version a hyperlink's description text was displayed as the user 'moused-over' a given shape, but that in 2003 and 2007 version the tooltip displays a standard message ('Click to follow hyperlink.') irrespective of the underlying link...

'Save as web' tab navigation with jQuery - Part 2

In the first part of this post I looked at a jQuery based approach for adding tab navigation to Visio's Save as web output and the steps required to implement this.  In this post I'm going to go into a little more detail about what the code we added is actually doing.

'Save as web' tab navigation with jQuery - Part 1

A recent newsgroup question asked whether it would be possible to add tab style navigation to Visio's Save As Web Page output.  There are a number of ways you might tackle this and here is a JavaScript based approach and more specifically, one that uses JQuery. 

You can see a live example here, but note that this is an Internet Explorer solution as only IE supports VML, (the vector based image format that Visio generates). 

I'll split this into two posts.  The first will look at how to create the functionality and the second, if you're interested, will focus on what the code is actually doing.

Editing the Save As Web details table

Spotted another Save As Web question today that I thought I'd have a go at.  The question basically asks how you can edit some of the default values in the web page's details table...

Changing a Save As Web cursor

I don't know what it is about Visio's Save As Web Page function that I find intriguing, but every time I spot a question about it I feel bound to dive in and take a look.  The most recent question in the newsgroups asks how to change the mouse cursor when the user hovers over a shape with a hyperlink.

Although there's no way to change the this type of behaviour through the UI, there's a fairly easy fix if you're prepared to do a bit of post-publish text editing...