Visio file header information import?

[AArt]

First, I apologize, I'm at a loss which forum to post this to.
When my wife was teaching Access, I was able to create a db that pulled in her student projects and compare some key data to see if any were sharing their files (aka cheating).
Now she's teaching a class where they turn in IS flowcharts in Visio. She found some cheaters (identical flowcharts), but I can't find any info about the .vsd file header. If I could pull in some kind of file ID or something, it would eliminate the angst of students going through denial and making up lies.
For example, Access saves a date/time stamp, down to the millisecond, of a file creation date. This is different than the date visible in Explorer. No matter how many times you save or copy the file, that field remains intact.
Once she showed that to the students, blubbering tears and confessions usually resulted.
Any ideas? Thanks.

 

[jrbarnett]

I'm not at all familiar with the VBA object model for visio, but assuming similar techniques to Access, why not set up some vba in visio (or another app) that reads the top level object level properties for that file and writes them into a table, alongside some sort of known identifier for the student (student number, exam candidate number etc).
From here you can carry out comparisons between file dates/times, text descriptions etc.

Obviously you would need to carry out testing to ensure this worked reliably.

John

 

[AArt]

That gives me something to think about. But I don't want to have to open 65 Visio files. With the dbs, I was able to automate opening all the files (even from other professors' classes) by putting them in one directory. Then by creating a few tables and comparing, it was easy to get identical dbs to float to the top. There were several hundred sudents turning in the Access projects, so it was a real time saver.