Develop Reference

How to generate word document with a datasource?

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

Editing a Word .docx file from C# application

I'm working on a C# project and I need to open a word doc and do a search/replace on it and save the result for later editing within Word itself.
This is to be a stand alone application and not a Word plugin.
Is there any simple code to get me started?
I've searched and not found anything helpful.
EDIT:
Looks like the nuget package DocX will do what I need.
http://docx.codeplex.com/
http://nuget.org/packages/DocX

If you save the doc as a .xml initially from within word you could open it as plain markup (as opposed to a binary) and do a (very rough) search and replace of the raw doc, you'll have to make sure you didn't mangle any tags containing the target words, but it would work.
You'll preserve all formatting and will be able to open/redistribute it as normal in word, the .xml is basically just an uncompressed .docx .
Edit: Giving this is a possible easy solution, not necessarily saying it's the best idea.

with Open XML you can open and manipulate a word document.

How to read metadata information from docx documents?

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.

Replacing contents inside docx and pdf file using asp.net c#

In my application I am using some templates in docx and pdf format. I am storing this docs to DB as Bytes.
Befor showing/sending this docs back to user or application I need to replace some contents inside the doc. eg:if the doc contain ##username## I need to replace this with the exact username of the customer. I am not getting a proper solution for this. Any good ideas?

For the docx file, your best bet is to use OpenXML, and instead of having special text like ##username##, replace it with a content control that you can fill in.
Since you specified docx, you can use OpenXML, which is great, it's an API. If it has to work with older doc files, then you'll have to automate Word (which should be avoided if at all possible).
For the PDF, your best bet is to create a PDF form, and fill it in a runtime (using a tool like itextsharp).
HTH,
Brian

For DOC / DOCX:
You should use the MSWord object model through MSWord assembly reference (will work only on machines which have msoffice installed.. or else you can use something like ASPOSE word libraries which wont need msoffice installation on server). You can programmatically trigger the Find-Replace context of word through the library's API.
For PDF: You will need a third party library for editing pdf files.. 3rd party libraries like ABCpdf are available.. (not sure whether Adobe itself has something for this)
The same mechanism like for word library.. but I am not sure whether you will be able to trigger the Find-replace context here or do something else... I have not used a pdf generation library.

What is the best way to populate a Word 2007 template in C#?

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.