Add Property Definitions (from Excel) to Master Object

[AntGut]

Good morning,

My question may be covered somewhere already, but can't seem to find it (not using correct search criteria?).

Scenario:
Customer wants diagrams depicting various network infrastructures (test, dev, dogfood, prod) and ability to see detailed data about each server object (via callouts, subpages, etc). These diagrams will be pushed to MOSS10. The actual/live data for each server object will eventually be pulled from a DB (acquired via WMI, etc) and refreshed at regular intervals.

The detailed information (custom properties) the customer wants has been defined in Excel following the format of the "Shape Data" table. For example,

Prop.HostName,"Host Name", No Formula, 0,No Formula,IF(Prop.SystemName="","",Prop.SystemName),"Network - General", FALSE, FALSE, 1033, No Formula
Prop.SystemRole,"System Role", No Formula, 1,"Unk;AD/DS;DB;Email;Web",No Formula,"General Info", FALSE, FALSE, 1033, No Formula

The list of these custom props is quite large (consider all the system, network and OS data available via WMI) and likely to change during this development/proto-typing stage.

Request:
Now for the stuff... How can we automagically add all the custom props defined in Excel to a master shape? This will be an iterative process where we may need to remove some/all custom props and re-add them back to the master (doing this manually is not ideal to say the least). The other aspect/catch is that the properties need to be displayed in specific order (within each SortKey grouping). Once the master has been approved, the stencil will be pushed out to users and included with the custom install of Visio.

Any help, guidance, etc is greatly appreciated...

AntGut

(Apologies if this needs to be recategorized)

[aledlund]

Chris has an article explaining how to correctly change master shapes via code on the forum (I can't find it at the moment). The visio sdk has several examples (based on languages) on how to change custom properties. Most of these videos have codeplex examples associated with them.

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?p=BAFAAC68D36484CA

al