Is it possible to automate Visio using a third party? - automation

We are trying to create a Visio project file and to process it with an external tool to generate a json file that a web app can read to create a decision tree based on the json contents.
We know about 3rd parties to automate MS Word files but no idea if there are others dealing with Visio files.
Google didn't return anything valid as per Automation it always returns links to how to program macros on it.
Any help will be appreciated.

There are many ways to automate Visio: macros, .net plugins, python, pascal, even windows powershell.
But if your final aim is getting Visio to the web, you may try the following link.
http://unmanagedvisio.com/category/svgexport/
The tool exports the drawing to an SVG embedded in an HTML file with Javascript functionality. Definitely worth a look.

Related

How can I expose Word VBA macro code as text files in VSC to better commit and track code changes?

Background and Problem
I lead a team of tech writers. Our team has a Word template (.dotm file) that has a bunch of VBA macros we've created over the years to help us automate tasks in Word. The macros are obviously stored inside of a .dotm template. Given that the code is stored in a binary file, the code is not easily traceable across commits.
Currently, we have to pull the changes on the branch and then open the macro inside Word's embedded code editor from the .dotm. But there's no way to see what exact code changes someone else made line by line or resolve conflicts using something like Beyond Compare.
What I Need
I'd like to find a way to automatically expose the VBA code from the .dotm as some kind of text file so that we can:
Do Word VBA coding tasks within VSC
Easily track and review each others code changes at the line level using our git repository
Resolve merge conflicts more easily
Has anyone found a way to do this?
What I've tried
I've tried searching online and on stackoverflow.
Hoping it might help, I installed ScriptLab, and I after following the MS tutorial, I now have Office Add-Ons working with VSC.
(https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/other/office),
(https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-ins/tutorials/word-tutorial) While the Office Add-Ons through VSC does provide an alternate (more modern) way of automating using Javascript, and the .js files are commit-able, it's not providing a way to expose the Word VBA, at least not that I could see.
Thank you in advance!
ScriptLab add-on is for playing with JavaScript code instantly, not designed as a macro infrastructure in Office.
Sounds like you need to switch your VBA macros to COM add-ins rails. There is no converters that can do this part of work for you automatically.
You may consider creating a VB.NET based add-in. In that case you will avoid language translating issues. You may find the Converting Code from VBA to Visual Basic .NET article helpful. It presents issues to consider when converting your Microsoft Office solutions from Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) to Visual Basic .NET. Provides a general overview of their differences, and then uses examples from Word and Excel to describe how you can use Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System to convert your code.

workflow for managing help content written by external co-workers

We develop a WPF application that has something like a context sensitive help. The content of the help pages is currently written as word documents by external colleagues (say biologists) and then translated to xaml code by developers. This process is tedious and error prone because the biologists don't see the xaml code and the word documents can't easily be diffed and tracked in a version control system.
So we'd like to improve this process and maintain the content in a single place, in a format that
is simple to edit (preferrably with a wysiwyg editor),
is stored in a simple ascii format (for diffing / version control) and
can be included automatically as a resource in our C# application.
The solution could be a framework, an external tool or any other idea.
The format should support simple html rendering such as bold and italic, superscripts, etc and images.
I suggest to use Flow Documents:
It is a WPF technology so you will use the well known tool.
Flow documents can be edited in RichTextBox WPF control. You can access an edited flow document via RichTextBox.Document property. Then you can save it into XAML file with XamlWriter. Taking all this thibngs into account you can easily and quickly create a simple application for your external colleagues.
Finally, you can load saved XAML files into FlowDocumentReader control in order to display them. It is described here.
I'm not only sure if flow documents can be embedded in resources. If it is not possible, I think that help files can be distributed separately. It doesn't seem to be a big problem.
Alternatively instead of flow documents you can use RTF format. RichTextBox can be also used to edit this kind of documents.

Programmatically accessing an application through its UI

Earlier I asked a question about command-line parameters to automate processing of a file in InfoPath. I'll probably get the Tumbleweed badge for that one.
Instead of attempting a batch solution through the command line, can someone suggest a good resource for developing a solution that will open an application and then perform actions through the application's user interface like opening a file, printing it, and closing the file?
I've seen a legacy application do this in the past where it would open Attachmate and perform I/O operations through Attachmate's interface - but I never saw the code.
One constraint is that the process will be initiated from an existing .NET solution (i.e. processing 10,000 files). I am also unable to rely on traditional Office macros like those found in Excel - InfoPath does not appear to support them.
One option for automating a GUI based application is to use AutoIT. It will allow you to script the actions that are necessary for clicking menu interfaces, working with dialogs, etc.
Depending on your needs, you can create an AutoIT script on your dev machine, compile it to a standard EXE, and deploy it with the .NET project's compiled artifacts. To pass data to it, either you have your AutoIT script take command line parameters, or you have the .NET solution write a to a file with all the input file parameters and have the AutoIT script read in the file to process it. Based on the number you have in the question, I'd go with the option of writing to a file.
Since you are already on .NET you might want to give the new UI Automation framework a try. I haven't tried it yet, but it is supposed to work with WPF and native Win32 applications.
MSDN also has some samples: UI Automation Control Pattern Samples
Attachmate has a scripting language, an API and all kinds of other stuff to help with automating it. So this may not have been a typical application.
On the other hand, Attachmate products are (IMO) horrible to the extreme and I will go to great lengths to avoid working with them in the first place.

Tools to manipulate doc file and convert them to pdf

I am looking for some good tools (free or paid, though free tool is always preferred)
for doing following operations on word doc files:
Manipulation of doc/docx/text files (like replacing some placeholders with DB values) as well as
converts doc files to .pdf
Because, I will be using this tool in my WCF service library,
So I am looking for a code library and not for a GUI based product.
Please share your experience regarding same.
Thank you!
Aspose has a decent collection of MS Office and PDF manipulation libraries.
Aspose Homepage
On the off chance that you're only looking for PDFs for viewing or archival purposes, you could also setup a PDF print driver and print your office files into a given location using Automation. You could also edit Office files through Automation although this may be tedious.
VSTO would give you access to the save as PDF from the Office applications.
Please see my answer to a related question on SO where I recommend a number of ways to convert your Word document to a format that is more easy to manipulate programmatically (using XSL-FO).

How to convert Word and Excel documents to PDF programmatically?

We are developing a little application that given a directory with PDF files creates a unique PDF file containing all the PDF files in the directory. This is a simple task using iTextSharp. The problem appears if in the directory exist some files like Word documents, or Excel documents.
My question is, is there a way to convert word, excel documents into PDF programmatically? And even better, is this possible without having the office suite installed on the computer running the application?
Office 2007 allows for this. I have found PDFCreator to be good, the VBA is included in sample files, and have heard that CutePDF is also good. PDFCreator and CutePDF are free.
To work without Office, you would need viewers, as far as I know:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c8378bf4-996c-4569-b547-75edbd03aaf0&displaylang=EN
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=95E24C87-8732-48D5-8689-AB826E7B8FDF&displaylang=en
I needed to do this myself, but managed to get it done with .Net and without 3rd party tools:
MSDN: Saving Word 2007 Documents to PDF and XPS Formats
Pretty simple, about 50 lines of code. However I think you will need Word 2007 installed on the machine as well as the ability to Save As PDF
To convert Word documents to PDF, take a look at jWordConvert, a java library that can do exactly that. This will not work with the Excel files though, only with the Word files. The language is not Sharp, it's Java but you could switch to use IText (which is java) instead of ITextSharp.
You can also use a component like activePDF's DocConverter to convert a lot formats to PDF.
Use PDF maker that comes with adobe 7- 9
I just used this code Covert Doc to PDF
I'm surprised Aspose wasn't mentioned here, it's easy, simple, and reliable. Downside is that it is not free.
I've used iTextSharp in the past, it's really good, easy to install (one DLL I believe), the merge takes a bit of tindering so it's not as easy to use as Aspose, but hey, it's free so that is the best part.
TallPDF.NET (comes with a hefty price tag) allows you to serve dynamic PDF from any .NET application including ASP.NET pages and web services.
PDFEdit (free and open source) is an editor for manipulating PDF documents. It has a GUI version and a command-line interface. Scripting is used to a great extent in the editor and almost anything can be scripted. It is possible to create your own scripts or plugins.
The most common way to convert files to a pdf is to print them to a pdf printer driver. There are a number of such drivers, one that i know of that will do the job is Black Ice.
Another is to use Adobe Acrobat's SDK. from memory its very expensive.
Its been a while since i have actually done any work with converting pdf's and the landscape may have changed.