You're reading from Microsoft Visio 2013 Business Process Diagramming and Validation - Second Edition

Product typeBook

Published inNov 2013

Reading LevelIntermediate

PublisherPackt

ISBN-139781782178002

Edition2nd Edition

Languages

Tools

Visio Professional

Concepts

Business Process Management

Author (1)

David Parker

Chapter 7. Creating Validation Rules

In the last chapter, we finished creating a tool to allow us to manipulate rules in Microsoft Visio 2013 Professional in the following ways:

Review rules
Edit rules
Create rules
Test rules
Import rules
Export rules

In this chapter, we will use this tool to create rules for structured diagramming. We will look at the common ShapeSheet functions that will be useful for rules, and the new validation functions.

We will also go through different scenarios for creating rules, especially with regard to the Filter and Test Expressions.

Note

You can also refer to an article that I wrote on MSDN to discover more information about validation rules: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff847470(v=office.14).aspx.

Overview of the document validation process

The user can initiate the validation

process by clicking on the Check Diagram button that is present on the PROCESS tab . This process will clear any existing issues for any changed pages in the document before looping through any rulesets. A changed page, sometimes referred to as dirty, is one that has shapes on it that have been altered in some way since the last validation. After validation, the process will re-mark as ignored any issues that were previously marked as ignored.

Overview of the document validation process

Any custom validation rules for a ruleset should be executed in code whenever the relevant RulesetValidated event is fired. Visio does not automatically clear all issues in the document when the user selects the Process or the Check Diagram button . It only clears issues for pages that are dirty, that is, those that have had shape changes since the last time it was validated.

Note

If you are writing code to validate your ruleset, then you could just iterate through any...

Validation functions

The syntax for the FilterExpression and TestExpression formulae are the same as for the ShapeSheet formulae. However, Visio 2013 includes some extra validation functions such as the ShapeSheet functions , but these functions cannot be used in the ShapeSheet formulae, with the exception of those marked with an asterisk.

The following table is an extract from The Diagram Validation API blog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/visio/archive/2010/01/07/the-diagram-validation-api.aspx

It lists the special quasi-ShapeSheet functions that can be used in the FilterExpression and TestExpression formulae, and has been extended to include the new functions added in Visio 2013 (marked with *).

Useful ShapeSheet functions

This is a table of the ShapeSheet functions that are commonly used in the Filter Expression and Test Expression formulae:

Function	Description
`HasCategory(categoryName)*`	Returns a Boolean indicating whether the shape has the specified category.
`Is1D()*`	Returns a Boolean indicating whether the shape is 1D or not.
`Role()`	Returns an integer indicating the shape role: {Element = 0, Connector = 1, Container = 2, Callout...

Filter and Test Expressions

You should use the FilterExpression function to reduce the number of target shapes (or pages) to be tested. You can then use the TestExpression function to apply to this reduced set in order to obtain a Boolean result.

A good way to understand how to write these expressions is to review the ones already created by Microsoft for the flowcharts and Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) templates . You can use the Rules Tools add-in to review them interactively, or to create a report. For example, create a new Flowchart or Cross-Functional Flowchart diagram and review the 11 rules present in the document in the Flowchart ruleset:

In fact, the same ruleset is applied to the Basic Flowchart and the Six Sigma diagrams too, so there are some rules that do not apply to all of them, such as the ones that involve swimlanes. These particular rules refer to containers, which do not exist unless the user manages to use a swimlane shape from the Cross-Functional Flowchart...

Summary

In this chapter we have learned how to use the target type to set the context for a rule. We then learned how to write a few Filter Expressions to reduce the shapes that need to be processed, and finally how to write Test Expressions that can raise issues. There are probably more expressions that could be written but we can work those out when we have specific requirements.

In the next chapter, we will learn how to publish custom templates with validation rules for deployment to other Visio 2013 Professional users.

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Author (1)

David Parker

David J Parker's background has been in data visualization ever since he struggled to produce lists of hospital equipment from Computer Aided Design models of buildings as a budding architect in the '80s. He moved into building and infrastructure asset management in the late '80s using a Unix system and gradually migrated to Windows-based systems throughout the '90s. He became a European Business partner of Visio Corporation in 1996 and presented the database-linked Visio solutions that he was providing merchant banks in London and New York with at several international conferences. David started bVisual Ltd. in 1998, which provides Visio-based solutions to various industries, and became a Silver-level Microsoft partner. He has been a Microsoft MVP (Visio) for the last 12 years and has helped Microsoft Corp, UK and Western Europe, by providing Visio solutions, training, website content, and presentations. David has had several books on Visio published and has been presenting Visio/SharePoint integration courses for many years for Microsoft Western Europe, from Oslo in the North down to Lisbon in the South. He has presented at SQL and SharePoint Saturday conferences and writes a regular blog for people interested in Microsoft Visio.
Read more about David Parker

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Function	Description
`AND(logical expression1,logical expression2,...,logical expressionN)`	Returns `TRUE` (1) if all of the logical expressions supplied are true. If any of the logical expressions are false or 0, the `AND` function returns `FALSE` (0).
`OR(logicalexpression1,logicalexpression2,...,logicalexpressionN)`	Returns `TRUE` (1) if any of the logical expressions are true.
`NOT(logicalexpression)`	Returns `TRUE` (1) if `logicalexpression` is false. Otherwise, it returns `FALSE` (0).
`IF(logicalexpression,valueiftrue,valueiffalse)`	Returns `valueiftrue` if `logicalexpression` is true. Otherwise, it returns `valueiffalse`.
`INDEX(index,"list"[,[delimiter][,[errorvalue]]])`	Returns the substring at the zero-based location index in the list delimited-by-delimiter. Or, it returns `-1` if not found.
`LOOKUP("key","list...`