Is it possible to make a toggle button in Visio to show if a port is patched?

[renosis]

Hi,

I have been searching around trying to find if it is possible to do this with Visio... but I am not sure I am asking in the right way that would find the proper tutorial for what I want to do. I do fiber-optic network installation and we give our customers a map that we constantly update. Now, we just handle the physical connections from patch panel to patch panel. The customer will then choose what ports on the fiber patch panel that they want to patch.

I want to make it easy for them to just click one of the ports to toggle the specific port from being patched to not patched and vice versa. If this is not possible with one click, I would like to set it up in a way that is easy for them to switch between showing a patched port and a not patched port.

The way the documentation is currently, I have a fiber connector (just a shape representing a fiber connector, not a Visio connector) that we copy and paste to all the ports in use. This is just a simple shape, that resembles a connector. All it denotes is whether the port is in use or not. It does not show a connection to the switch or anything. Attached is a picture.

I would like to have it, so that they can click a port and the fiber connector shape either appears or disappears and maybe the text on that particular strand change from "Open" to "Active".

Any suggestions or links to tutorial that explains something similar to this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Renosis

[aledlund]

Can it be accomplished with code? Yes. It's mainly a problem of scale. I did something similar for a medium sized data center and had over 5000 ports defined just part way through. Even a medium sized Cisco 6500 can easily have several hundred ports to keep track of (four 96port ethernet cards) or a rack of blade based servers with two fibre ports per blade (san and back-up). You can check this out, a lot of the code is published
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBAFAAC68D36484CA&feature=view_all
and there are products available to do this (AssetGen).
The biggest problem is enforcing change management (If the cable is moved/changed it has to be logged somewhere).
al