Chapter 5. Developing a Validation API Interface

Microsoft Visio 2013 does not provide a user interface to the Validation API that rules developers can use, so this chapter is devoted to building a useful tool to enable the tasks to be performed easily. The tool will enable you to review and amend existing rules, to create new rules, and to even perform tests on rules. We will create an explorer panel that displays a selectable tree view of the open rulesets, and an editable panel to display the detail of the ruleset or rule selected in the tree view.

Don't worry if you are not a C# coder, because the completed tool is available from the companion website http://www.visiorules.com. However, we will go through the development of this tool in this chapter because it introduces you to using C#, rather than VBA that we used in the previous chapters.

This chapter will also describe how to use this tool, so it should be worth reading through, even if you are not a C# coder. It will...