generate visio diagram on the fly with .NET

Question

is there a good way of generating a visio diagram of an architecture (with a decent layout) if i have a list of client apps, services and databases? i would have thought there would be a decent way to generate this on the fly.

Segregate

'csharp' and 'dotnet' tags are just plain wrong here. You've been using the site for long enough you ought to know better. – Doloritas

i thought i read that these get resolved to the right ones through a recurring script – Segregate

I've had good results with Aspose.Diagram: aspose.com/.net/diagram-component.aspx – Assignation

Answer 1

There is VisioAutomation on GitHub. If you have Visio installed it can automate the generation of a diagram. If you can model the diagram you want as a directed graph then it can automatically layout the graph for you (using MSAGL).

Here is a basic example of creating the directed graph

        using VACONNECT = VisioAutomation.Shapes.Connections;
        var d = new VisioAutomation.Models.DirectedGraph.Drawing();

        var basic_stencil = "basic_u.vss";
        var n0 = d.AddShape("n0", "Node 0", basic_stencil, "Rectangle");
        n0.Size = new VA.Drawing.Size(3, 2);
        var n1 = d.AddShape("n1", "Node 1", basic_stencil, "Rectangle");
        var n2 = d.AddShape("n2", "Node 2", basic_stencil, "Rectangle");
        var n3 = d.AddShape("n3", "Node 3", basic_stencil, "Rectangle");
        var n4 = d.AddShape("n4", "Node 4\nUnconnected", basic_stencil, "Rectangle");

        var c0 = d.AddConnection("c0", n0, n1, "0 -> 1", VACONNECT.ConnectorType.Curved);
        var c1 = d.AddConnection("c1", n1, n2, "1 -> 2", VACONNECT.ConnectorType.RightAngle);
        var c2 = d.AddConnection("c2", n1, n0, "0 -> 1", VACONNECT.ConnectorType.Curved);
        var c3 = d.AddConnection("c3", n0, n2, "0 -> 2", VACONNECT.ConnectorType.Straight);
        var c4 = d.AddConnection("c4", n2, n3, "2 -> 3", VACONNECT.ConnectorType.Curved);
        var c5 = d.AddConnection("c5", n3, n0, "3 -> 0", VACONNECT.ConnectorType.Curved);

And then to draw it:

        var options = new VisioAutomation.Models.DirectedGraph.MsaglLayoutOptions();

        var page = visio_app.ActivePage;
        d.Render(page,options);

Drona

This is the very definition of a link-only answer. – Cotquean