In Visio, it’s possible to use placeholders to display resource properties.
As an example, take the nested placeholder below:
[Resource:[reservation:[this service],ResourceID|NodeID=10|],Property=Input]
This one will show the ‘Input’ property of a resource, by resolving the booking linked to the service, and the resource guid associated with the specified node id.
As these placeholders need to be filled in as text, directly in a shape, the Visio drawing can become quite messy and chaotic.
I was wondering if there is a way keep such shapes free of text – or just use an * – and specify the placeholder within Visio shape data?
Thanks!
Hi Ruben,
I don’t believe this is possible. New Visual Overview features step away from the ‘*’ and ‘Info’ approach as it had several draw backs:
- It only allows one dynamic value in your shape text. What if we want to show 2 properties in the text of a shape?
- It was duplicate code to maintain. The placeholder functionality can be reused in the shape data as well as in the shape text.
Perhaps a new feature could be introduced that lets the user configure the text in the shape data itself (for instance the shape data ‘Text’). This would keep the shapes from containing all the placeholder text while maintaining the current flexibility.