Microsoft Visio 2010 Business Process Diagramming and Validation: Create custom Validation Rules for structured diagrams and increase the accuracy of your business information with Visio 2010 Premium Edition

Firstly, Microsoft Visio 2010 introduces the new Validation API for structured diagrams, and provides several examples of this in use, for example with the new BPMN Diagram and Microsoft SharePoint Workflow templates, and the improvements to the Basic Flowchart and Cross-Functional Flowchart templates, all of which are found in the Flowchart category.

Templates in Visio consist of a predefined Visio document that has one or more pages, and may have a series of docked stencils (usually positioned on the left-hand side of workspace area). The template document may have an associated list of add-ons that are active whilst it is in use, and, with Visio 2010 Premium Edition, an associated list of structured diagram validation rule sets as well.

Secondly, the concept of a Subprocess has been introduced. This enables processes to hyperlink to other pages describing the subprocesses in the same document, or even across documents. This latter point is necessary if subprocesses are stored in a document library, such as Microsoft SharePoint.

The following screenshot illustrates how an existing subprocess can be associated with a shape in a larger process:

In addition, a subprocess page can be created from an existing shape, or a selection of shapes, in which case they will be moved to the newly-created page.

There are also a number of new ease-of-use features in Microsoft Visio 2010 to assist in the creation and revision of process flow diagrams. These include:

However, this book is not about teaching the user how to use these features, since there will be many other authors willing to show you how to perform tasks that only need to be explained once. This book is about understanding the Validation API in particular, so that you can create or amend, the rules to match the business logic that your business requires.

Microsoft Visio now sits at the top of the Microsoft Process Management Product Stack, providing a Business Process Analysis (BPA) or Business Process Modeling (BPM) tool for business analysts, process owners/participants, and line of business software architects/developers.

Of course, your particular business may not have all, or parts, of the stack, but you will see in later chapters how Visio 2010 can be used in isolation for business process management to a certain depth.

If we look at the Visio BPM Maturity Model that Microsoft presented to their partners, then we can see that Visio 2010 has filled some of the gaps that were still present after Visio 2007. However, we can also see that there are plenty of opportunities for partners to provide solutions on top of the Visio platform.

Throughout this book we will be going into detail about Level 5 (Validation) in Visio 2010, because it is important to understand the core capabilities provided in Visio 2010. We will then be able to take the opportunity to provide custom Business Rule Modeling and Visualization.

A structured diagram is a set of logical relationships between items, where these relationships provide visual organization or describe special interaction behaviors between them.

The Microsoft Visio team analyzed the requirements for adding structure to diagrams, and came up with a number of features that needed to be added to the Visio product to achieve this:

The following diagram demonstrates the use of Containers and Callouts in the construction of a basic flowchart, which has been validated using the Validation API, that in turn uses the Connectivity API.

There are two process flow diagram templates in Visio 2010 Premium edition that have been enhanced since the previous versions of Visio to include validation rules.

The Flowchart templates

There is now very little difference between the Basic Flowchart template and the Cross-Functional Flowchart template in the Flowchart category. In fact, they are identical apart from the latter opening with a couple of Swimlane shapes already placed on the page. Any Basic Flowchart diagram can become a Cross-Functional Flowchart diagram with the dragging-and-dropping of a Swimlane shape onto the page, at which point the new Cross-Functional Flowchart tab will appear.

In addition, parts of the new Six Sigma template in the Business category, which is Visio 2010 Premium edition only, use the same flowchart rules.

There are two new process flow diagram templates in addition to the Six Sigma Diagram template, in the Flowchart category of Visio 2010 Premium edition that include their own validation rules. The first, BPMN Diagram, provides native Visio support for an important and widely-used process flow notation, and the second, Microsoft SharePoint Workflow enables visual development of SharePoint workflows that integrates closely with Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint 2010.

BPMN Diagram template

The Object Management Group/Business Process Management Initiative (http://bpmn.org/ ) promotes the BPMN standards. The BMPN version in Microsoft Visio 2010 is 1.2. There is no better short description of BPMN than the charter from the OMG's website, which states:

A standard Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) will provide businesses with the capability of understanding their internal business procedures in a graphical notation and will give organizations the ability to communicate these procedures in a standard manner. Furthermore, the graphical notation will facilitate the understanding of the performance collaborations and business transactions between the organizations. This will ensure that businesses will understand themselves and participants in their business and will enable organizations to adjust to new internal and B2B business circumstances quickly.

Having been involved in the creation of two other BPMN solutions based on earlier versions of Visio, I believe that the native support of BPMN is a very important development for Microsoft, because it is obviously a very popular methodology for the description of an interchange of business processes.

The BMPN template in Visio 2010 contains five docked stencils, each of them containing a logical set of shapes.

Each of the shapes has BPMN attributes in the form of a set of Shape Data, which can be edited using the Shape Data window or dialog. Some shapes can also be edited using the right-mouse menu.

These Shape Data rows correspond to BPMN attributes, as specified by the OMG specification. In the above diagram, a Task shape is selected revealing that there are many permutations that can be set. A few of these permutations are made easily accessible by laying them out in the BPMN Activities stencil as different shapes.

In reality, any of these Task/Activity shapes can be changed into any of the other shapes in the BPMN Activities stencil by amending the Shape Data. Thus, the original name of the Master shape is really immaterial, since it is the Shape Data that determines how it should be understood.

SharePoint Workflow Designer template

Microsoft Visio 2010 also includes a template and shapes for designing workflows that can be imported into Microsoft SharePoint Designer. You can also take workflow files that were created in Microsoft SharePoint Designer and open them in Visio, which generates a diagram of the workflow that you can view and modify. You can pass the workflow back and forth between the two with no loss of data or functionality, by using a Visio Workflow Interchange (*.vwi) file.

Validation ensures that the diagram is compliant with the required business logic by checking that it is properly constructed. Therefore, you need to be able to verify that the rule set being used is the one that your business requires. Visio will not provide instant feedback at the moment when you transgress a rule. However, it will check your diagram against a rule set only when you select Check Diagram. It will then provide you with feedback on why any given rule has been broken.

Some of the Validation API can be accessed via the Process tab on the Diagram Validation group, but there is more that is available only to developers, thus enabling you to automate some tasks if necessary.

The first group on the Process tab, Subprocess, is for the creation of subprocesses, and the third group is for the Import and Export of a SharePoint Workflow, but it is the second group, Diagram Validation, that is of most interest here.

In this second group, the first button, Check Diagram, validates the whole document against the selected rule set(s). You can have more than one rule set in a document, which can be enabled or disabled as required. The drop-down menu on the Check Diagram button enables you to select which Rules to Check, and also to Import Rules From another open Visio document. It is a pity that you cannot export to/import from XML, but we will create our own tool to do that in a later chapter.

At this point, we should be aware that Visio documents can either be saved as binary (normally with a *.vsd extension) or XML format (normally with a *.vdx extension). So, if we save a Visio document that contains a rule set in XML format, then it can be opened in an XML viewer or editor, such as Microsoft's XML Notepad. Here we can see that the new Validation extensions for Microsoft Visio 2010 (internally, version 14) are clearly visible in XML:

If we expand a v14:RuleSet branch, and one of the v14:Rule sub-branches, then we can see how a rule is defined.

Later, we will be going into these definitions in much greater detail, but for now, notice that the v14:RuleFilter and v14:RuleTest elements contain formulae that precisely define what constitutes the particular rule.

The Diagram Validation group also has the option to show/hide the Issues Window, which has a right-mouse menu that is identical (apart from the additional Arrange by menu option) to the drop-down menu on the Ignore This Issue button.

Now that we can see that a Rule has an ID, and belongs to a RuleSet that also has an ID, we can begin to understand how an issue can be associated with a shape. So, if we expand an v14:Issue element in the Visio document XML, we can see that v14:Issue has v14:IssueTarget and v14:RuleInfo elements.

If we were to look for the Shape in the document XML, we can find it by its ID under the Shapes collection of the Page, also identified by its ID.

In fact, the PageID and ShapeID element of an IssueTarget are optional because an issue may just be associated with a page, or even with the whole document.

We will use the new Validation API to explore these RuleSets, Rules, and Issues in later chapters, and we will expose them to scrutiny so that your business can be satisfied that you have modeled the business logic correctly.

There is also a new Visio Process Repository, which is a site template that is included with Microsoft SharePoint 2010. It provides a place to share and collaborate on process diagrams. The repository has built-in file access control and version control—users can view the process diagram simultaneously and edit the diagram without corrupting the original.

This repository can therefore ensure that a user is editing the most recent version of a process diagram, and enables a user to find out about updates that have been made to processes of interest to them.

In addition, administrators can monitor whether diagrams comply with a business's internal standards or not, or discover, for example, which processes apply to a specified department.

Microsoft Visio has had, for several versions, a useful Save As Web feature that creates a mini-website, complete with widgets for pan and zoom, Shape Data, and shape reports. This has worked best using the Vector Markup Language (VML) in Microsoft Internet Explorer, or in Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) using a web browser plugin in IE, although it has native support in some other browsers. This is quite powerful, but it does require that the native Visio file is republished if any changes are made to the document. Visio 2010 has introduced the increasingly adopted XAML format, which actually means that the Visio file will be rendered for viewing in Silverlight. This is a very useful addition.

In addition, Microsoft has an ActiveX Visio Viewer control that can display native Visio files that are in both binary and XML format. This control is installed as default with Microsoft Outlook 2007+, but is also available as a separate free download from Microsoft. In fact, the Visio Viewer control has a programmable API that enables Shape Data to be extracted and exposed too. While this viewer has the advantage that the native file does not have to be republished, its reach is limited by the choice of browsers available, and the willingness to make the native Visio file accessible—this is not always the best strategy.

Microsoft Visio 2010 provides Visio Services for Microsoft SharePoint. Therefore, with rendering on the server, any client that accesses the Microsoft SharePoint site will have the ability to view Visio diagrams without having to install anything locally.

The user can interact with the diagrams by clicking on shapes to view the Shape Data, navigating any embedded hyperlinks, as well as pan/zoom and print capabilities. These are capabilities of the Save As Web and Visio Viewer options too.

Microsoft Visio 2007 introduced the ability to add a data recordset to a diagram and refresh the data so that the diagram could be kept up-to-date, but the Save As Web html pages and the Visio Viewer ActiveX control are not able to automatically respond to any data changes. Therefore, the diagram can quickly become outdated, thus requiring you to refresh the diagram in Visio, and then to republish it.

Now with Visio Services, that same data recordset can be refreshed by the server, thus providing everyone who views the diagram using the new Visio web part with the latest information. This is extremely nice, but be aware that there are some limitations, such as no shapes will be added, moved, or deleted in this operation, as only linked Shape Data and Data Graphics are updated and all layers will be visible. Still, you no longer have to republish just to refresh the data set!

Microsoft decided to split Visio 2010 into three editions, so you need to be aware of the relevant features that are in each of them. In the following matrix, a black dot denotes which features are present:

Although you will need Microsoft Visio 2010 Premium edition to use the Validation capabilities, the other editions will be able to review any of the diagrams created.

By now, you should be eager to explore the out of the box structured diagram functionality, and perhaps be considering how to create validation rules for your own business. In doing so, I would advise that you always look to build upon what Visio provides—do not try to replicate it! I believe that trying to create your own Shape Data objects, or your own line routing algorithms, for example, is ultimately a waste of time as they will lead you down some dead-ends, some of which still exist within the boxed Visio product. For example, the following three legacy diagram templates in Visio have their own limitations. They are:

One of the frequently asked questions by a newbie to Visio when confronted by the multiple diagram categories and types is how a particular template is supposed to be used? Often, they are directed to the Visio online help for examples of how to create certain types of diagrams, but this is not always sufficient because they are really asking for automatic assistance as they create the diagram. What they usually want is in fact a guided diagramming system; they require a system that provides them with some feedback on the way that they are composing a diagram. It is easy to drag-and-drop shapes in Visio, to connect them together, to make a diagram pretty with embellishments, or to add text in a variety of ways. However, this loosely-created drawing cannot consistently convey any semantic meaning unless it follows generally accepted rules. It is the imposition of rules that turns a pretty picture into a meaningful mesh of semantic symbology. This is where Microsoft Visio 2010 has made a great advance because it has provided us with the ability to create validation rules for different types of behaviors. In fact, these new features are worthy of a brand new tab, the Process tab, which although automatically applied to several drawing templates, is also available for use on any type of diagram.

In this chapter, we looked at an overview of the new capabilities and process diagram types in Visio 2010, especially with regard to structured and validated diagrams.

Microsoft Visio 2010 provides considerable ease-of-use features to the end user, a rich programming model for the developer, and greater capabilities for document management and sharing than ever before.

In the next chapter, we will need to delve deeper into the internal structure of a Visio document and the use of its various APIs so that you can best understand how to formulate your own rules to represent the business logic that you require.