Containers: Adding values of shapes inside

[scottk42]

Let me give a bit of background. My team puts together Visio diagrams for the hardware implementation for our company's software products. Lately we've been moving into the virtualized world so we're using more shapes of VMs and virtual pools, and such. The problem is that we have to do a lot of manual calculations and counting and I would like to stop doing this by having Visio automatically calculate everything for me. We're attempting to eliminate as many little math errors from manual entries as possible.

Let me describe what I've created so far.

I have 3 master shapes.

Master shape 1: Virtual Machine Guest.
On drop, this shape prompts for RAM, vCPU and the VM name. There are fixed lists for OS, and other software options. When all items are selected it displays these on the shape, formatted appropriately. There's only one master shape here.

Master shape 2: Virtual Machine Host.
On drop this shape prompts for Host Name, RAM, # of CPU, Cores per CPU, Hypervisor, Disks and other items. As the Guest, it displays these on the box. This shape has container properties only so I can move around the Guests within the Host. Currently I have several of these in the different RAM/CPU configurations.

Master shape 3: Virtual Pool
On drop, this shape prompts for the number of guests, number of hosts, amount of RAM used by guests amount of vCPU used by guests, RAM/Processor count/core count of each host. I can hard set the RAM/CPU of the hosts since there is multiple objects to retrieve that data from, although they would all match. This shape is also a container with the same container properties as the host, basically enough to move the pool and all shapes contained within it.

What I want to do is automatically add the number of hosts, number of guests, amount of RAM and vCPU used by each guest and display them on this pool shape.

Typically we will set down a Virtual Pool shape. Then drag in the number of hosts and VMs appropriate to the installation, then update the pool manually. What I want to do is have it update automatically with as minimal manual calculations as possible.

I'm fairly certain there's functionality to do this and it's probably a combination of shape data on the guest and host shapes and functions on the pool shape but I can't seem to figure it out.

Thanks,

Scott Kneip
Bally Technologies

[aledlund]

Scott,
easily accomplished with some simple vba.
al

[scottk42]

Like a script run on a page or something embedded into the shapes themselves?

[aledlund]

vba run against the page (due to the fact you're going to have to match shape counts against parent shapes).
al