I'm using Visio 2007 to creage an organization chart. I have successfully syncronized it with the heirchal employee structure in our ERP system which uses an Oracle 9i DB. I was pleasantly surprised by the results. I was also able to save it as an html file and post it on our Intranet site. However, always wanting to take it one step further, is there a way that I can automatically update the web page when the Data in the DB is updated? If not, then would you propose a shorter way to accomplish the update than going through the entire syncronization process in visio? I hope that was clear.
Although the update to ERP occurs at the database level, the Organization chart synchronization is driven by the Visio application.
You would need to somehow schedule a daily/weekly batch job to execute Visio with the appropiate command to synchronize the Org chart and deploy to Intranet.
Did you use Visio 2007 data linking to connect the org chart shapes to the database? if so, you can set a parameter in Visio that will automatically refresh the drawing from the database at a time interval you define (note: the drawing must remain open for the automatic update to occur). This would take care of step 1 without requiring any programming -- just setting a Visio parameter.
As for step 2, republishing the web page, there's an example in the Visio software developer's kit of a macro that will save your drawing as a web page. You could either run the macro yourselft periodically, or you could, with a bit of extra work using a second SDK example, add the code to perform the save whenever certain events occur, e.g., when data is refreshed.
I ran the org chart wizard and connected to the DB using odbc. I do not see this parameter that will automatically refress the drawing. I would love to learn more about this approach. I just downloaded the SDK and installed it. I'll have more specific questions as i play around with it some.
