Consuming Visio Diagrams with Visio Services
Visio Services enables users to bring their Visio diagrams to the web world. Other users can view the Visio documents using a web browser, without needing to install the Visio client on their machine. Moreover Visio diagrams can be connected to various data sources, and Visio Services can be configured to refresh the diagrams with any change in the underlying data.
To better understand the features offered by Visio Services, consider a scenario in which an organization wants to monitor the health of its data centers around the world using visual status indicators. Let’s say the health data is fed into a SharePoint list at regular intervals, and using Visio Services you need to design a mechanism to represent that data visually.
Try It Yourself: Represent Data Center Health Indicators Visually Using Visio Services
1. Create a new SharePoint list; call it Data Center Health, with the columns and data shown in Figure 22.22.
Figure 22.22. Data Center Health list
2. Next create a blank Visio drawing (we’re using Visio 2010) and insert a world map image from the clipart gallery.
3. Search for Data Center Visio shape and add six of those onto the drawing surface, corresponding to the six cities in the data source, as shown in Figure 22.23.
Figure 22.23. Static data center location diagram
4. With this you have a static data center location diagram ready. Next you bind this diagram to your list and update the health indicators based on changes to the health data. In Visio, select the Data tab from the ribbon and click Link Shapes to Data Symbol to launch the Data Selector Wizard. Select Microsoft SharePoint Foundation List as the source, as shown in Figure 22.24.
Figure 22.24. Selecting a data source
5. Enter the URL of your SharePoint site on the next screen and click Next to view the lists in your site, as shown in Figure 22.25. Select the Data Center Health list and click Next.
Figure 22.25. Configuring a SharePoint list as data source
6. Click Finish to save the changes. The data from the list will be fetched and displayed in Visio, as shown in Figure 22.26.
Figure 22.26. External data fetched and displayed by Visio
7. Next select the data center symbol located in the vicinity of Melbourne (Australia) on the world map. Right-click the first row (corresponding to Melbourne) displayed in the external data window and select the Link to Selected Shapes option from the context menu. Repeat this for all the other shapes as well, linking them to their respective data items.
8. With this, you are done linking data to shapes; now do some more configurations to format the data in a nicer way. For this, click the Edit Data Graphic menu as shown in Figure 22.27.
Figure 22.27. Editing data graphic
9. You see a window similar to one shown in Figure 22.28. Select the Location field and click the Edit Item button.
Figure 22.28. Configuring data fields
10. Make sure that your font size, positioning, and other properties are set to values as shown in Figure 22.29.
Figure 22.29. Configuring the location field
11. The ID field shown previously in Figure 22.28 is not of much use to you; swap it with the Health field instead. Select the ID field and click Edit Item. In the next screen (shown in Figure 22.30) set Data Field to Health and set the Displayed As property to Icon Set. Also configure the rules to display icons as per the values configured in Figure 22.30.
Figure 22.30. Configuring the Health field
12. With these configurations you are all set with the Visio diagram. Click OK to save the changes.
13. You can save your file as a Visio web drawing (.vdw) and upload it manually to a SharePoint document library or you can also select the Save and Send (Save to SharePoint) option from the File menu to directly upload your Visio drawing to your site.
14. Once the drawing is uploaded to a document library in the SharePoint site, click the Visio file to open it in the web browser, as shown in Figure 22.31.
Figure 22.31. Visio diagram opened using a web browser
You can also display this drawing on a web part or wiki page by using the Visio Web Access web part and configuring the path to the Visio drawing file in the web part, as shown in Figure 22.32.
Figure 22.32. Visio Web Access web part
You can also configure other options such as refresh duration from the web part to decide how frequently you want to update the Visio diagram with any changes in data.