From creating a Visio file so you can link it to a DataMiner View/Service/Element, over editing it and eventually getting to use the eventual result of your hard work.
What is your ideal flow for working with Visual Overview? Think out of the box! What do you wish was possible, but currently isn't? Maybe the DataMiner Cube embedded panel in your Visio application is a good start, but it could have more interaction?
Do you prefer Visio file versioning over a possible world where the Visual Overview updates live as you're working on it or not?
Let me know your wildest dreams for the future of Visual Overview, the Visio application and how it interacts with DataMiner Cube.
Hi Toon, here are some initial ideas (I will look to add more as I think of them! I imagine that some of these things may already be available and its possible I am not aware of them yet!)
For reference, here at DAZN UK we are currently running V9.6CU13 on Production and V10.1.2 on Staging.
Visual Overviews: Generally, I believe that if would be very useful to have an additional configuration 'layer'(s) available between the Dataminer user interface 'Edit' GUI and Microsoft Visio. This would be looking towards reducing the amount of bespoke entries / scripting that is required to be applied to various Shape Data within Visio. Also, the potential to reduce the necessity of moving between the Dataminer Edit GUI and MS Visio according to what is being added/updated.
1. Via such a new 'middle' display configuration interface, offer all valid shape data entries from a drop box, eg element, children, childrensort, view ... etc. etc.
2. A new 'middle' interface that would allow changes to be deployed without the necessity of having MS Visio installed on the user's edit client.
3. Offer shape 'indexing' so that it is possible to have a separate numeric entry in the shape data that defines the order that self-populating display shapes are displayed in (other than by starting the actual names with a number or needing to include positioning co-ordinates)
4. As well as the Visio 'vsdx' file format, offer a facility to import other drawing file formats; for example PDF and AutoCAD - such that that can be added to / included within a Visio background, whilst as much as possible maintaining reasonable legibility. (AutoCAD drawings can be imported into Visio, however they often become virtually unreadable as a result.)
5. Visio versioning (as you mention) as well as a live editing function option (that you also mention).
More suggestions will follow! - I would be happy to talk all this through with you at some point.
Hi Paul, thanks for the great answer!
I can indeed tell you that we already have some of these things in place, so I’m very glad to hear this is also your vision for easier Visual Overview Development.
1. We already have exactly this in place! A panel that is hosted by the Visio application but controlled by DataMiner Cube will be present in your application when you do “edit in Visio” from Cube. This panel is currently quite basic but already very useful, allowing you to
– add and remove shape data with the click of a button
– select the key you want from a dropdown, based on whether you’re focused on the page or a shape
– Basic syntax checking (valid shape data name, etc.)
– placeholders intellisense (if you start typing ‘[‘ a list of possible placeholders will appear with info and syntax description on each of them)
We will likely further extend this in the future to allow for DataMiner related selections (elements, parameter, etc.).
2. This was the next thing we experimented with, so I’m very happy to hear it’s a path we can possibly move forward on. In a first phase, we were planning on using the panel described above to show you a live preview of the shape as it would look in DataMiner Cube once you saved it. The limitation here would be that you’re missing interaction between different shapes and situations occuring in the Visual Overview itself. Therefore in a truly ideal world, we would then move to a full preview.
This was going to be, however, part of the advanced editing embedded in the Visio application. We were moving away from the previous “online editing” we had in Visual Overview itself because our feeling was that not being able to offer the full Visio application functionality there caused people to move away from it and use the application anyway. To my feeling, people that design Visual Overviews will most often have the application installed. Could you tell me where that’s not the case? If we can gather enough metrics on people in this situation, maybe we can evaluate 🙂
3. That sounds interesting and is something we have considered in some cases, but mostly for debugging purposes. If you could give me the use cases for which this would be useful, I’d be very grateful and we can consider this (or maybe even come up with better options to achieve what you want).
4. If I understand correctly, it would be great if you had a better tool at your disposal for importing Autocad drawings into Visual Overview in DataMiner Cube than running them through the Visio application? Or would you like a way to convert them into a Visio drawing so that you can make them dynamic? Depending on your use case we can consider the options.
5. Would a combination of the 2 be your ideal world or does one (live editing mostly) make the largely obsolete? We have tinkered with both and versioning is a slightly smaller workload than live editing is, but it’d be a shame if it is then rendered obsolete once we release live editing.
Thanks a bunch for taking the effort to type this out! It’s extremely valuable to us to have this feedback.