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 make changes here, they will affect all users of SI; 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 in the order from top to bottom.

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

The default is "Yes," which 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 no specific shape is assigned to the product, it will then attempt to drop the shape assigned to the subcategory, assuming the option is set to "Yes."

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

The default is "Yes," which relates to pre-populated shape assignments 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's 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 several options.

The first major option is "Use default shape based on category type," which refers to three category types for products: 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 "Speaker" category type 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 option is selected and you drag a product to a drawing page that has no shape assignments, the Select Shape form will open, allowing you to choose any desired shape.

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