I see there was a 4/22/08 post about issues with exporting to PDF a diagram that contains shape nodes with decorations. In that case, the problem was solved by setting "the decorations argument to null, instead of passing an empty array to the Shape constructor".

My problem is my shapes have decorations and when I try to export to PDF I get dinged with a  "Parameter is not valid" exception thrown in System.Drawing. Do you guys have a suggestion for a workaround?

Thanks.

Gladly. Here is an example of one such shape:

               shpNew = New Shape( _
                   New ElementTemplate() _
                   {New LineTemplate(100, 20, 100, 80), _
                       New BezierTemplate(100, 80, 100, 95, 70, 100, 50, 100), _
                       New BezierTemplate(50, 100, 30, 100, 0, 95, 0, 80), _
                       New LineTemplate(0, 80, 0, 20), _
                       New BezierTemplate(0, 20, 0, 5, 30, 0, 50, 0), _
                       New BezierTemplate(50, 0, 70, 0, 100, 5, 100, 20)}, _
                   New ElementTemplate() _
                   {New BezierTemplate(100, 20, 100, 35, 70, 40, 50, 40), _
                       New BezierTemplate(50, 40, 30, 40, 0, 35, 0, 20), _
                       New BezierTemplate(100, 30, 100, 45, 70, 50, 50, 50), _
                       New BezierTemplate(50, 50, 30, 50, 0, 45, 0, 30), _
                       New LineTemplate(100, 30, 100, 80), _
                       New BezierTemplate(100, 80, 100, 95, 70, 100, 50, 100), _
                       New BezierTemplate(50, 100, 30, 100, 0, 95, 0, 80), _
                       New LineTemplate(0, 80, 0, 30)}, _
                   Nothing, FillMode.Winding, "ChangeOF")

I figured out the problem. Some of the shapes I was exporting had decorations while others did not. I instantiated the shapes without decorations using an empty array. When I changed the empty arrays to Null—oops Nothing—it exported OK.

This took me a while to figure out because I used this constructor to initialize the shape to be exported:

mfn.Shape = New MindFusion.Diagramming.Shape(Outline, FillMode)

I then added the Decorations in a subsequent statement:

mfn.Shape.Decorations = SomeShapeObject.Shape.Decorations



When I used the following constructor which includes the Decorations argument the export worked fine.

mfn.Shape = New MindFusion.Diagramming.Shape(Outline, Decorations, Nothing, FillMode)


Incidentally, I had all kinds of trouble when I started experimenting with exporting to different file formats because the shapes were actually subclasses of the Shape class. This happened even though I called the RegisterItemCall method:

MindFusion.Diagramming.Diagram.RegisterItemClass(GetType(DiagramNode), "DiagramNode", 1)

To fix, I just created a new 'hidden' Diagram object and copied all the nodes and links to it from the original. When I copied the (subclassed) shape nodes, I just converted them on-the-fly to 'real' Shape objects. What actually got exported then was the 'cloned' diagram, not the original.