Professional Development with Visio® 2000

Properties, Methods, and References

Once you get a reference to the object you want to query or manipulate, you might want to find out about other properties of that object. For example, in addition to the Name property, the Shape object has a Text property that returns, as a string, the text on the SmartShape symbol and a Type property that returns an identifier for the type of Visio SmartShape symbol, such as a group, a guide, or other type of symbol. Most properties that do not return objects return strings or integers.

You can set properties as well, as long as they are not read-only. In the Visio environment, properties can be read-only, read-write, or in a few rare cases, write-only (custom menus and toolbars are examples of these).

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