Overview

Visio is a popular package for putting together cabling diagrams for customer communication.  With a little effort, these diagrams can be turned into working schedules.  Alistair and Simon sent me some of their drawings and from this I was able to see some common themes and usage.

Symbols

One of the main changes I made was to go through various ISO and IEC standards to work out the most 'standards based' symbols to use.

Attributes 

The symbols here have attributes that are appropriate for WebBrick installations, here are some typical example:

• CableID
• CableTECH
• Room
• Position
• Notes
• SwitchTECH
• LampTECH
  
• WBConn
• WBConnDI
• WBConnMI

To reduce typing, some of these attributes have been made into fixed lists. By filling in these attributes as you place objects on the drawing it is possible to use a 'report' to extract a cable schedule.  Look for the H2M8 cable schedule report.

Gotchas

 If you add then delete an object in a Visio drawing then the object 'hangs around'.  Therefore when you run a report you'll get some objects with blank attributes.  You can just edit them out of the report.  In the meantime I'll try to find out how to purge these objects