Visio & UML - Showing pointers in attributes and return values

Question

I have the requirement of generating UML Diagrams for one of my C++ assignments. I'm using Visio 2007 and I'm having trouble representing C++ pointers. I've found a way to add a suffix to Datatypes however it's rather time consuming to do this for every pointer used or returned in my program.

Basically I'm trying to get -object1 : Object* = NULL and +Object() : Object* without digging into the properties and adding * to the suffix field every time.

I'm pretty much stuck with Microsoft software for making diagrams and coding so please don't suggest I use different software. However, if Visual Studio 2003 supports making UML Diagrams in a less painful way than Visio, I wouldn't object to using Visual Studio but please tell me where that option is.

Answer 1

One solution is to create a custom datatype with Object* as the name but that would need to be done for every class.

Answer 2

You can have Visio save its data files to an XML format. You could then write a script to make the * tweaks wherever you want them. Depending on how big your model is, this may be faster than the tedious manual way that you're using now, especially if you already have some experience in a language like Perl.