I want to populate a Word Document template with a runtime datasource (object instance). I read a lot about Word Schema, XML, XSD etc. but everything is still very fuzzy and difficult to understand the different terminologies.
I followed this but I don't know where to get a word schema to add to the word document or schema library.
Within Visual Studio 2010, I also managed finished the steps for Document-Level Projects by drag and drop the datasource (object) to create the content controls, but I don't know what to do after that. How can I use the word document at runtime with binded object data and open an instance of the word document for editing/printing?
Thankfully, the open source DocX by Cathal Coffey solves both problems
nicely, and unlike Interop, presents an easy-to-use, highly
discoverable API for performing myriad manipulations/extractions
against the Word document format (the .docx format, introduced as of
Word 2007). Best of all, DocX does not require that Word or any other
Office dependencies be installed on the client machine! The full
source is available from Coffey's Codeplex repo, or you can add DocX
to your project using Nuget.
Source: Writing to Word Doc
Content controls support binding only with custom xml part.
So first add your XML as customxml part of the doucment.
Office.CustomXMLPart employeeXMLPart = this.CustomXMLParts.Add(xmlData);//xmlData is xml string
Then bind the content control with the xpath
string xPathName = "ns:employees/ns:employee/ns:name";
this.plainTextContentControl1.XMLMapping.SetMapping(xPathName,
prefix, employeeXMLPart);
Here is the reference article from MSDN
Related
I've been searching on ways to create letters using a C# Windows Form application in Visual Studio based on information from a local SQL server. I've seen some other topics but each answer seems to be really different.
My knowledge is pretty basic about this and wouldn't mind a step in the right direction. Is it actually possible? is there a better solution rather than creating word documents?
I only really need to be able to create a word document which has some text and and tables is this possible?
If you are creating a document of same kind with different data then use a Word template (.dotx) and use content controls or bookmarks in the document.
Advantage: Saves your time in manipulating with formatting and alignment in the document
Then use Open XML to just replace your content controls or bookmarks with the values.
Advantage: You dont need Word Interop assemblies to be deployed. Faster and recommended by Microsoft.
Depending on your needs, you could either simply copy a pre-existing file, or if you need to modify the document from code, you can use Microsoft Office Automation. (see C# office 2010 automation)
what I need to achieve is to have a word document template(docx), which will contain Title, Author name, Date, etc.
This template then will be used by users to complete it. I need to create a c# program, that will take in the docx file and read all the information of interest(title, name, date, ..).
So my questions are:
How do I put the metadata into the template saying: this is Title, this is Date, this is Name, etc? (not programatically)
How do I programmatically read that information?
One way to approach this would be to use Content Controls. In Office, you can create your template, and then for each of your respective inputs of interest you can place one of these controls. They're under the Developer tab in Office.
After inserting your controls you'll need for each of them to have a unique name. Office will let them all have the same name, but you'll need to uniquely identify all of them in your template document.
You now need to get the data that's input in to these controls. Again, there's likely to be some better solutions but Eric White has all kinds of great OpenXML stuff, and so here's one of his: Iterating over Content Controls
I think there's problems with finding content controls nested within a table. So, if you do that, then I think you have to specifically loop over the elements of the table to find content controls within.
Also, you're probably going to want to save a .docx from your .doct file, which I don't think there's any built-in "one-liner" method in OpenXML; however, you can create a new Word document, and then write the file stream of the template in to the newly created docx file. Again, of course, there may be better solutions out there.
Have you been here? There's lots of good stuff:
Introduction to OpenXML
Additionally, Eric has been releasing more and more videos on the OpenXML YouTube channel
1) how do I put the metadata into the template saying: this is Title,
this is Date, this is Name, etc? (not programatically)
You could do that on Info tab in MS Word 2010 as shown below:
2) how do I programmatically read that information?
Once you created your document (or template) you could always look inside it with Open XML SDK 2.0 Productivity Tool (wich is installed with OpenXML SDK) to see where (what classes to use) to get/set some information from/to document.
Also I think this post might help you to solve your task:
Add and update custom document properties in a docx
UPDATE:
Hi Dave,
Please have a look at this MSDN Article - Retrieving Application Properties from Word 2010 Documents by Using the Open XML SDK 2.0
Hope this is exactly what you are looking for.
All OpenXML documents have built in core Metadata that will do what you need through System.IO.Packaging. Once you open the word file using the open xml sdk in c#, you can get to these values via the PackageProperties class. There are 11 Properties you can use.
You "encourage" your user to enter the metadata using Word's Document Information Panel (DIP).
You can force this on by default when they open your template, by a setting in the Developer Toolbar for the template. See the following article on how to set this in your template.
I wrote a quick Windows Form app that displays this information using open xml sdk call to the PackageProperties of the Word file that is displayed above.
Here is the full solution with the sample word file included.
Hope this helps.
I'm looking for new alternatives in creating/changing doc/docx files from word template (asp.net). In the past I was creating documents using XML schemes, but since i4i case Word 2010 don't support them. Microsoft suggests custom controls, but I have large documents with quite a few dynamically generated tables and I don't think that these controls are a good solution.
Does anyone have any alternatives similar to XML Schemes?
Check out the Open XML SDK 2.0 from Microsoft.
Then you can use the Simple OOXML project to get you started.
Does not work for legacy office documents (i.e. doc/xls) only the new ones like docx and xslx.
hint: a docx/xslx is really a zip file full of xml documents. just change the extension to zip.
I have a word document (docx format) that I need to populate with data from a dictionary . The key of the dict will be the word field to be populated. I was wondering what is the best way to do this (bookmarks, mail merge fields, etc)? I did a little work with Bookmarks, but I would like to be able to reuse some of the fields (like "first_name" field etc), bookmarks are unique (or I seem to think so).
A few lines of code on how to do this would be really helpful. (c# .net 4.0)
You can make xpath data bindings in a .docx document. A .docx file is just a zipped file in the Office Open XML which can be opened in .Net without third-party libraries.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.io.packaging.package.open.aspx
And you can then supply the .docx file with a XML file in your own format. Then the only thing you have to do is to edit the embedded XML file and not the document itself. See:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mikeormond/archive/2008/06/20/word-2007-content-controls-databinding-and-schema-validation.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/acoat/archive/2007/03/01/linking-word-2007-content-controls-to-custom-xml.aspx
And a custom tool to do the bindings:
http://dbe.codeplex.com/
You could properly also use some .Net interaction with Word itself but I can't help you with that.
I have a need to populate a Word 2007 document from code, including repeating table sections - currently I use an XML transform on the document.xml portion of the docx, but this is extremely time consuming to setup (each time you edit the template document, you have to recreate the transform.xsl file, which can take up to a day to do for complex documents).
Is there any better way, preferably one that doesn't require you to run Word 2007 during the process?
Regards
Richard
I tried myself to write some code for that purpose, but gave up. Now I use a 3rd party product: Aspose Words and am quite happy with that component.
It doesn't need Microsoft Word on the machine.
"Aspose.Words enables .NET and Java applications to read, modify and write Word® documents without utilizing Microsoft Word®."
"Aspose.Words supports a wide array of features including document creation, content and formatting manipulation, powerful mail merge abilities, comprehensive support of DOC, OOXML, RTF, WordprocessingML, HTML, OpenDocument and PDF formats. Aspose.Words is truly the most affordable, fastest and feature rich Word component on the market."
DISCLAIMER: I am not affiliated with that company.
Since a DOCX file is simply a ZIP file containing a folder structure with images and XML files, you should be able to manipulate those XML files using our favorite XML manipulation API. The specification of the format is known as WordprocessingML, part of the Office Open XML standard.
I thought I'd mention it in case the 3rd party tool suggested by splattne is not an option.
Have you considered using the Open XML SDK from Microsoft? The only dependency is on .NET 3.5.
Documentation: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb448854%28office.14%29.aspx
Download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=C6E744E5-36E9-45F5-8D8C-331DF206E0D0&displaylang=en
Use invoke docx lib. it supports table data (http://invoke.co.nz/products/help/docx_tables.aspx). More info at http://invoke.co.nz/products/docx.aspx
Have you considered using VB? You could create a separate assembly to populate your document.
I know you are looking for a C# solution, but the XML literal support is one area where XML literal support could help you populate the document. Create a document in Word to server as a template, unzip the docx, paste the relevant XML section you want to change into you VB code, and add code to fill in the parts you wish to change. It's difficult to say from your description if this would meet your requirements but I would suggest looking into it.