Selection Settings for Shapes

You can use the Selection Setting for Shapes feature to set rules for what shapes you want to drop in Visio for the four page types.

You may never decide to change these settings, as the defaults were designed to be logical. Unless you are an advanced Visio user, you will likely not make changes to these settings.

If you do make changes here, these changes will affect all users of SI, i.e., this is not a local setting.

In the D-Tools SI window within Visio, click the Manage Shapes button and click Selection Settings.

You will see the Shape Selection Setting form.

There are three sections on this form, and they are applied from top to bottom.

The first section on the form is "Use shape assigned to product and category."

The default is "Yes," and this relates to specific settings you may have made using either the Assign Categories to Shapes or Assign Shapes to Categories features.

If you click the Options link, you can change the defaults to your liking. These settings apply from top to bottom.

For example, if there is no specific shape assigned to the product, it will then attempt to drop the shape assigned to the subcategory, assuming you leave the option set to "Yes."

The second section on the form is "If no shape is assigned then use shape recommended by D-Tools SI."

The default is "Yes," and this relates to pre-populated shape assignments that are coded into SI.

If you click the Options link, you can change the defaults to your liking. These settings apply from top to bottom.

For example, if there is no specific shape assigned to the product from a Manufacturer stencil, the shape recommended for the subcategory will drop.

The third section on the form is "If no shape is assigned or found then D-Tools SI should."

Here you have quite a few options.

The first major option is "Use default shape based on category type," and this refers to three category types for oroducts: Equipment, Speaker, and Wire.

This is the default setting in this section. Here you can select the category type from the dropdown and click the Assign link for the View Type (Page Type) that you want to set.

In this example, I selected the category type of "Speaker", and then clicked the Assign link for the Plan View type.

This opens up the Assign Shape to Category Type form, where I selected the "8-Star Icon" shape from the "General Plan Shapes" stencil.

I left the "Display shape data on assignment" box checked and clicked OK.

This opened the Shape Data window, where I then changed the fill color to "Orange-Dark."

I clicked OK and can now see that this shape is assigned to the Plan View type.

The other option in this section is "Prompt to select shape."

When this is selected and you drag a product to a drawing page that has no shape assignments, the Select Shape form will open where you can choose whatever shape you want.

From this form, you can choose to either set this shape as the default just for the product, for the category and subcategory, or just for the category.