Chapter 6. Reviewing Validation Rules and Issues

In the last chapter, we created a tool to allow us to review and edit rules in Microsoft Visio 2010 Premium. In this chapter, we will extend this tool to provide an import/export routine of rules to an XML file or to an HTML report, and enables us to add issues as annotations in Visio diagrams. These features will allow rules to be stored, restored, printed out, and pondered over, along with the issues that they may create in a diagram. This should provide confidence that the data diagrams have been created with a rigor that can be relied upon.

This chapter will cover:

• Further extensions to the Fluent UI ribbon

• Annotating the diagram with issues

• Exporting rule sets to XML

• Importing rule sets from XML

• Creating rule set reports

Extensions to our ribbon

Our Rules Tools group in the Process tab of the Visio ribbon needs to be extended to include our new features. The features can be viewed in the following screenshot:

There are four new buttons required...