dermotita

Hi there,

I'm stuck on a problem that a few people have met. We have renamed one of the custom properties in our product data to "Cable Summary". When we drop a shape (from the wire and cable stencil) on to a drawing we wish to display this property if it is not blank. I have tried playing around with the custom formula on the insert field dialog and have looked at the custom properties section of the shape sheet, but can not link the "Cable Summary" custom Property to the shape.

We are using D-Tools 5.5.177.0
and Visio 11.8223.8221 SP3.

I notice that there is no "shape data" section in the shape sheet in our version of visio. Will this make a difference?

NareshN

Hi,

In the 5.5 SP1 which is going to be out soon you will be able to do this. In the current 5.5release it cannot be done.

In 5.5 SP1 in the Visio Master you can create a custom property - "prop.CustomProperty1" (does not matter what you name it like Cable Summary - you still have to call the property prop.CustomProperty1 in Visio) and it will populate with the custom property 1 when shape is dropped or product updated.

Poornima

An article has been posted on the support wikiblog on how to display custom properties on D-tools visio Shapes.

How to Display Custom Properties on D-tools Visio Shapes

Memphix

Very good... tutorial is for Visio 2007 but also works fine for Visio 2003.

Where it says find Shape Data in shapesheet it is Custom Properties, and where it says Shape Data for field again it is Custom Properties.

You can also add an alternative name to the new field (that by default shows 0) by adding a name with in quotes in the Value column in Custom Properties (in Shapesheet).

Small problem with this streamlining feature is that when no value for a field ie, Component ID, then that line is blank... which is good, however it keeps a blank line... not good, especially if there is a solid color background behind the text. This means if your squeezing a number of cables on the page you have to either worry about the z-index and/or deleting the blank line to shrink the text box... very annoying.
--> this is only a small problem as I have found how to remove that solid white background from behind the text block of the cable IDs. To do this, go to the shapesheet properties and change section Text Block Format field TextBkgnd to 0.
Why cant this be modified in Visio, not sure why this is locked down. You are able to change the line color and the text color, why not text background fill?

Is it possible to automatically remove the blank line. I have tried modifying the shape already with no success.