Text field conditional to something

[Yacine]

 Nice setup and tempting. So tempting, that I implemented some of the ideas. Have a look at the 2 masters I saved in the document stencil. Play with the properties of the shapes within the yellow frame and those of page (language, project number, ...)
The general approach is to have the data in one place, rather than distributed over several shapes. Why? Because that makes the data more intelligent – easier to synthesize by an external software (Excel, Access, etc.). Easiest recipient for several data: the page. The project data and the settings are defined there (project name, date, designer, etc.).
As the amount of data may increase with time, the visibility of the data rows is separated into sections displayed depending on a "DataSet" field by a formula (eg: Invisible = NOT(STRSAME(Prop.DataSet,"Project")) )
Now two big tasks:
1)      Change the language of the labels depending on the language set at page level.
2)      Set the value of several prop fields in shapes for display.

1)      Labels language:
The values of the labels in different languages are set into semi-colon separated lists in the page's data.
Each language (Eng, Fre, Ger, Jap) has its own list and the words must be at the same position in each list.
A set of SETF/GetRef formulas set the right formula in the label master. The wording to display is chosen from the English list and pulled out of the "foreign" list.
2)      The values fields
The master "DataField" is much easier. One could have also set up a list, but as this is setting thing a base knowledge of the system can be expected, thus a simpler setup.
The master looks for the name of an according data field in the page's prop section and displays it.

So far for my playing. I enjoyed it, but...
I definitely cannot recommend it. Why? The maintenance whilst already simplified requires a profound knowledge of Visio, Shapesheets and the specific data structure.
An implementation with a DB – or Excel – would make so much more sense. So far for my 2 cents.

[Yacine]

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