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Shape improvements

My main gripe with Lucid is using shapes. Everything is designed around Visio, so if you use vendor shapes such as Cisco’s, you have to open them in Visio and unlock or edit the shape data fields before adding them to your Lucid shape library. It’s also a pain to move the shape data that you attach to shapes. 

On grouped items, adding shape data doesn’t work correctly. You have to click into the shape, and pick a single shape, and add the data there, which is clunky. 

 

Direct import from Visio is spotty at best. 

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Micah
Userlevel 6
Badge +18

Hi James, thanks for taking the time to post! I’d like to dig into some of these points in case there are additional recommendations I can provide:

  • Regarding opening shapes in Visio and unlocking or editing there - are you referring to starting with shapes that are only available in Visio? Are you adding them to your Lucid libraries via stencil or document import? I would love to understand your process in more depth here. 
  • Regarding moving shape data - do you mean rearranging the text of the data as it appears on a shape? Or adding/removing the data itself to a shape?
  • Regarding adding shape data to a group - I’d like to recommend this community post, which details adding data to a grouped shape as a whole, rather than individual components.
  • Regarding direct import from Visio - what method of import are you referring to here? Your document as a whole?

 

Thanks for your help and patience!

J
Badge +1

For the stencil add, that’d be importing a stencil to a shape library. 

There are stencil settings that are defaulted on the shapes when you import them that lock the shape data. There’s no way that I’ve found to unlock this shape data without first opening the stencil in visio, then unlocking the shape data, saving the stencil, and re-importing in lucid. 

 

Moving the text on a shape in general is a bit clunky. I know you can do so with the target looking drop down and offset but that is inconsistent if you change the size of the shape. It would be nice to be able to drag the anchor point for the shape label/data, and rotate it in less than 90 degree intervals. It’s not a big deal on this one, since there is an effective way to move the text, it’s just not very simple. 

 

I’m mostly mentioning the shape data breaking in a group. 
 

There’s no T+ button on the data field, and when you right click and choose ‘Insert value as text’ it comes up as an error.

It works correctly if I double click into the lower shape and add the data through there. 

 

For importing, that would be importing a full document. 

Micah
Userlevel 6
Badge +18

@james.yoder Thanks for this detailed response!  A few follow-up questions:

  • Regarding locked shape data on stencils that you have to unlock in Visio prior to importing - would you be able to provide an example of what this looks like when it’s locked in Lucidchart?
  • Regarding displaying data as text - I see that your “hostname” example is where you’re seeing this. Do you experience it with other custom data (like “IP address”) as well? And do you see this across all documents you’ve imported these shapes into?
J
Badge +1
  • Regarding locked shape data on stencils that you have to unlock in Visio prior to importing - would you be able to provide an example of what this looks like when it’s locked in Lucidchart?

It acts similarly to the group data add. There’s no T+ button and if you hit the menu button on the data, it shows #error in the data box on the shape. 

  • Regarding displaying data as text - I see that your “hostname” example is where you’re seeing this. Do you experience it with other custom data (like “IP address”) as well? And do you see this across all documents you’ve imported these shapes into?

It happens for any shape data on a group that I try to add to the group/shape. 

 

I’d happy to hop in a video call and show you some of these things. I may just be approaching them incorrectly. 

 

Micah
Userlevel 6
Badge +18

Hi James, thanks for your response and willingness to help! Would you please provide a document access PIN (Help > Temporary Support PIN) for a document that contains these shapes so I can take a closer look and attempt to reproduce the problem? This PIN is for internal usage only and doesn’t grant public access to your document, so you can safely share it directly in this thread. 

J
Badge +1

I’ve worked around these issues in my documents, and was only posting at the request of my Lucid rep. I don’t have the authority to grant you access to any of our documents. 

 

Micah
Userlevel 6
Badge +18

@james.yoder I understand and appreciate your help and patience! If you’re willing and able to share a stencil file that you’re importing via support ticket, I would love to continue investigating. 

 

Regardless, I appreciate the time spent in this conversation and your detailed feedback - much appreciated!

J
Badge +1

https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/assets/prod/visio/visio/routers-isr-4000.zip

 

https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/assets/prod/visio/visio/switches-catalyst-9000.zip

 

https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/assets/prod/visio/visio/switches_cisco_nexus_9000.zip

 

https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en_us/about/ac50/ac47/3015VSS.zip

Micah
Userlevel 6
Badge +18

Hi James, thank you. This is exactly what I needed - I was able to take a closer look, and I’ve discovered the cause of the [#ERROR] message you’re seeing. It seems the majority of these shapes do not have a pre-determined text area/label associated with them, which is why there is not a +T option in the data panel for these fields. Additionally, this means that when you use the right-click> +T Insert value as text option, it creates the text box as a separate shape entirely. When clicking into this text shape, you can see that it's defined by a formula - {{=this.'*name of property from original shape*'}} - that references a property from the original shape. However, because it contains THIS (a reference to the selected shape itself) and the text box shape itself doesn't contain this property, the value can't be found.

 

I’ve reported this as a bug to our development team, because ideally the newly created text shape would reference the original shape instead of having a broken formula.

 

There are two workarounds here I would like to suggest:

  1. Simply copying and pasting the text of the data directly from the data panel and adding it to a new text box yourself. 
  2. If you’d like to continue to use formulas and not copy/paste the data as plain text, do the following: to reference the original shape, you would need the shape ID from the original shape, which you can get by using a LABEL formula (=LABEL) or ID attribute (=this.$id). The, you would add that to the shape and then copy it. Once you have the ID, you can reference it in the text box’s formula. Instead of =this.'product description', they would use =#'<id>'.'product description'For example, in my first shape I added the formula =LABEL, which gave me the ID g.YUSgp~czsO. In my text box, I added the formula =#'g.YUSgp~czsO'.'product description' , which gives me the value of the product description field from the original shape (and will stay in sync with the original shape).

 

 

J
Badge +1

OR.. you can go into Visio and unlock the data field editing. 

Then save as a new stencil, and it works just fine.

 

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