When building solutions with Visio, one first has to understand the components that make up a solution. On the surface there is the drawing environment that contains the drawing page, the stencils of master shapes, the templates and the add-ons used to create the drawing. Visio drawings are much more than the lines and arcs that form the picture.
Visio drawings can be rich with information that describes the picture in detail.
We refer to the drawing and the information that describes the drawing as a model. We ll start our discussion of the Visio Development Platform with a demonstration program. Now imagine a sales engineer constructing a network diagram or wiring closet diagram and then generating a Bill of Materials on the spot as part of his sales presentation. Run the add-on Create Purchase Order by clicking on the page with the right mouse button. This add-on reads extracts custom property information from the shapes in the drawing and displays this information in a spreadsheet.