First published on MSDN on May, 26 2006
We're going to kick off the Visio Insights blog with a series on the essential features that make Visio the popular diagramming application it is today. In each topic, we'll cover the basics from a user's perspective and then dive more deeply into the technical details.
Essential Feature: Drag and Drop
Fifteen years ago a new diagramming product hit the marketplace with a revolutionary way to draw. Rather than construct drawings from geometric primitives such as lines and arcs, Visio offered the ability to drag and drop pre-built shapes. One of the early tag-lines for Visio was Drag, Drop, Done . Making diagrams in Visio is more a matter of assembling than drawing, and this mechanism made diagramming approachable for many people.
So how does drag and drop really work?
The pre-built shapes are called Masters, often referred to as Master shapes. The masters are organized into documents called Stencils. The stencils are displayed on the left side of the drawing workspace inside the Shapes window. To add a shape to the drawing, you drag one of the masters from a stencil to the drawing page.
Behind the scenes Visio does a lot of work to place that shape on the page. A stencil is a separate document from the drawing, so Visio first must copy the master from the stencil to the drawing document. (This operation is generally not visible to the user. If you want to see the masters in the drawing document, go to File > Shapes > Show Document Stencil.) Then Visio creates an instance of the master shape and places it on the drawing page.
If you drag the same master shape out from the stencil again, Visio checks to see if there is already a copy of the master in the drawing document. If the master is already present, Visio skips the copy operation and proceeds to create another shape instance to place on the drawing page. Visio checks a property on the master called the UniqueID to determine if two masters are alike. Whenever you edit a master, the UniqueID changes. Thus it is possible for two masters to have the same name, but Visio will know that the masters are different by their UniqueIDs.
UniqueID lets Visio distinguish between two masters with the same name, but users may have more difficulty telling them apart. To avoid that problem, Visio forces the name of each master within a document to be unique. When you add a different master by the same name to a document, Visio automatically renames the incoming master by appending a decimal point and a number such as Person.1 . There may be a scenario where you want Visio to interpret masters with the same name as being identical, so there is a property on the master that you can set to “Match master by name on drop”.
Why go through all these steps to drop a shape on the page? It ensures that Visio documents are always portable. There are no external references to masters in a Visio document, so you can pass documents around and not worry about missing information. Master shapes are a powerful concept, and we'll have more to say about them in a future post.
