Token Replacement in Office Documents

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Introduction

A common situation is to prepare invoices, etc. from information in a database. Clients usually have extremely customized invoice formats, but the data to be filled in is basically the same. This article and its related code present a new (I have searched, but could not find anything related to this topic, so I believe it's new), innovative, and productive way of producing dynamic Office documents. I am using the word Office in this entire document as it does not relate solely to Microsoft Office. I have tested this approach on Open Office as well, and it works. The associated code enables to perform Token Replacement on both Office products.

Background

Until now, I was creating HTML on the fly, and making it available for download as a *.doc or *.xls file, exploiting Office application capabilities for processing HTML documents. But, there was a limit this approach would go to. There were obvious limitations in precise positioning in HTML and how Office applications interpret and display that. Not to mention the advanced processing capabilities of Office documents that are missing while generating dynamic HTML.

A new approach had been swirling around my mind since the time Office products embraced XML formats. We, developers, have been using token replacement for a long time for producing dynamic content. How about doing it with Office documents!!

So, I finally got a chance to implement this, when the document I had to produce exceeded HTML formatting capabilities. Now, I was trying to create a Word document, with tokens of the form [$TokenName$] in it, and replacing the tokens with actual text, programmatically. However, it was not as easy as I thought.

Word 2007 splits up tokens into multiple parts, depending upon regions to be checked for spellings. Ditto is the case with OO (OO refers to Open Office). These Office products might split up what you consider a single word into multiple runs (they use the word run) of text surrounded by their XML. That makes the scenario almost impossible. I tried to discuss my approach at Microsoft Forums and at Brian Jones' blog. However, I could not get any useful help.

So, I decided to take it up myself.

Some More Background

As I said, I would be talking of Office XML in general, not particularly related to Microsoft Office or Open Office. Consider one thing before moving forward, only Microsoft Office 2007 applications use a full XML document format. Office 2003 probably uses XML, but I have not studied the Office 2003 document format. Neither have I tested the code on Office 2003 documents.

Regarding OO, I downloaded it specifically for this project. The version was 2.4 at the time I downloaded it. So, it should work on it and later versions. However, you, as a developer, should not be worried. Read forward.

I evaluated several options before actually having to use this approach I am describing (you can say, I was not left with any other option). VSTO is Microsoft Office centric. Also, with the minimal knowledge I collected about VSTO (by asking questions on forums), I thought it would not help. Microsoft's Open XML SDK for Office was indeed a very attractive one. However, I was not in any way interested in the Open XML schemas used by Microsoft Office, and this product's documentation clearly stated that you need to have a good knowledge of the XML schemas to exploit this library.

Then, I ripped opened a Microsoft Office 2007 document (it is simply a zip file, just unzip it), and analyzed the contents. It was plain XML. And, I immediately decided to use the XML processing capabilities of .NET to process what it actually was, just plain-sane XML, not treating it as any special schema.

So, the attached code does not require anything special to be installed. You can use it easily on a Desktop application, as well as a Web application, with the only requirement of .NET 3.5 installed on the machine where the code is executing. Not even the associated Office product needs to be installed. I am treating it as pure XML, so there are no other requirements absolutely. Just prepare an Office document with your tokens in it, deploy the document with your code, and you are ready to scramble.

Now Comes the Code

It all starts with opening up an Office package (an Office file is now called an Office package technically, as it is not just a single file). A good starting point would be to open any Office document with your favorite Zip tool and analyze the contents.

I am using the SharpZipLib library for anything related to processing Zip files during this token replacement process. Once you open the Zip file, you would notice that there are multiple files. The main content file is "word/document.xml" for Microsoft Word 2007 and "content.xml" for OO Writer. As of now, the code can process only Word and Writer packages. I would add support for Excel and OO Calc as I get time. I acknowledge that the code attached is a bit immature at this time. Still, I am writing this article to discuss it with others so that you can adapt and enhance it for your scenario, if you find it useful. I am not sure when I would be able to make enhancements myself.

The overall code structure is as follows:

Straight away after opening up the Zip file, I read its contents into an XDocument (the code uses LINQ and LINQ to XML all over). Right now, the major functionality is coming from the TokenReplacementBase class. You specify the filename to open, the token start, and the token end (both strings).

OfficePackage is the helper class to enable reading and modification of the Office document packages.

Regex

The code relies heavily on the .NET System.Text.RegularExpressions for token replacement. You should be careful while choosing the token start and the token end. I am not a Regex expert, and as of now, the characters in your token delimiters should not appear in your content. I have used "[$" and "$]" in the attached sample doc files.

Immediately after constructing an object of the appropriate base class, you can start calling the replaceToken() method (in a loop probably, to process all tokens), passing in your token (including the delimiters) and the replacement value. On the first call to this method, the code parses the entire content, looking for tokens, and stores a dictionary of matches found with the token as the key. After that, and on all subsequent calls, it just consults this dictionary to perform the substitution.

As an alternative, you can create a List (of TokenReplacementInfo) (a helper class in the project), and call replaceTokens(), passing in this List just once, and it performs all the substitutions.

XmlUtil is the helper class that helps in Office XML specific text matching and replacement.

Sample

Suppose you have the following token: [$Date$].

You can replace it with the call...

t.replaceToken("[$Date$]", DateTime.Today)

... where t is an object of the concrete class for the package you are processing (Rahul.Office.MS.Word.TokenReplacement or Rahul.Office.OO.Writer.TokenReplacement).

Fine Points

• The token replacement functionality is flexible. You can specify metadata in your token to control exactly how the token is replaced. E.g.:
  • The token:

    [$Date$<metadata><type>date
    </type><format>dd.MM.yyyy</format></metadata>]

    when replaced, would adhere to the date format you specified.

  • As another one:

    [$InvoiceTotalValue$<metadata><type>money
    </type><format>text</format></metadata>]

    would treat the replacement value as a monetary one, and automatically convert it to English (hundred thousand, five hundred six only, etc.).

  • The last metadata supported right now is for normal text.

    [$InvoiceTotalValue$<metadata>
    <type>money</type><format>text</format>
    <transform>upper</transform></metadata>

    The transforms "upper" and "lower" converts the text to uppercase or lower-case, respectively. This can be applied to text as well as monetary values whose format is text.

  Note that the metadata appears only in the Office document you have prepared. While making function calls, you still just call:

  t.replaceToken("[$Date$]", DateTime.Today)

  The code automatically determines if that token has any metadata attached in the document. The metadata tags can appear anywhere between your token.

• The same token can appear multiple times. The default behavior is to replace all occurrences of the same token with the replacement value specified as the first call to replaceToken() with that token as the input. However, there is an overload of replaceToken() available, where you can specify the i^th occurrence of the token to be replaced. Thus, the following call...

  t.replaceToken("[$Date$]", DateTime.Today, 2)

  ... would replace only the second occurrence of the token [$Date$] in the original content. (There are some finer points related to i^th occurrence replacement, which are documented properly in the code attached.)

The same token can occur multiple times with different metadata. And, each token occurrence would be replaced taking into consideration the metadata specified, if any, for that occurrence only.

• Another common situation in invoicing would be an invoice that can contain multiple products. But, you don't know how many when preparing the tokenized document at the development time. Not need to worry. Just prepare a sample row in a table. Leave a unique token in that row in any cell. Then, before calling replaceToken(), call replicateRow(), passing in that unique token and the number of times the row is to be replicated.
• All replacements are done in memory. When you are finished, remember to call the save() function, as that replaces the content in the original Office package specified in the constructor.

Using the Code

Here are the precise steps for using the code:

1. Prepare a Word or Writer document (not template) with tokens in it.
2. Create a Console application. Add a reference to the attached Rahul.Office assembly
3. Start replacing tokens. A sample code is presented below.

Sample

Here's all it takes to replace tokens:

Sub Main()
    'Copy the Tokenized file. The new copy would actually be processed.
    System.IO.File.Copy("TokenizedInvoice.docx", _
                        "ProcessedInvoice.docx", True)

    'Construct an object to Microsoft Office Word Token Replacement.
    Dim t As New TokenReplacement("ProcessedInvoice.docx", _
                                  "[$", "$]")

    'Construct a list of Token Info's to be replaced.
    Dim list As New List(Of TokenReplacementInfo)

    list.Add(New TokenReplacementInfo("[$LCNo$]", "11111"))
    list.Add(New TokenReplacementInfo("[$LCInvoiceNo$]", "22222"))

    'Pay attention here. The Date token has metadata in the Invoice.
         'You do not (should not) specify the metadata here.
    list.Add(New TokenReplacementInfo("[$LCInvoiceDate$]", DateTime.Today))

    'Notice the Tokenized document has a token called [$ReplicateRow$]. That
         'row has Product information, and suppose I have 2 prodcuts in this
         'Invoice. True indicates to remove the Row Replication token after the
         'replication process.
    t.replicateRow("[$ReplicateRow$]", True, 2)

    'I am substituting 2 products here. So, using 0 and 1 to indicate the
         'occurence of the token to be replaced, because the replicate rows would
         'have identical Tokens.
    'First good goes here. Last parameter is 0 for replacement of first
         'occurrences of all tokens specified. (-1 would have replaced all),
    'which also is the default behaviour without the third parameter.
    list.Add(New TokenReplacementInfo("[$LCGoodOrderName$]", _
             "My neighbour's car", 0))
    list.Add(New TokenReplacementInfo("[$LCGoodOrderBrand$]", _
             "Bentley", 0))
    list.Add(New TokenReplacementInfo("[$LCGoodOrderSpecification$]", _
             "Black, with leather upholstery", 0))

    'Second good goes here Last parameter is 1 for replacement of second
         'occurrences of all tokens specified.
    'Omitted for brevity

    'Check the Tokenized Invoice. There are multiple occurrences of
         '[$LCInvoiceTotalValue$] with different metadata.
    'Just one call replaces all, honoring each one's metadata individually.
    list.Add(New TokenReplacementInfo("[$LCInvoiceTotalValue$]", 10010200))
    list.Add(New TokenReplacementInfo("[$LCDeliveryType$]", "CNF"))

    'Replace all in one go.
    t.replaceTokens(list)

    'Don't forget the save the document.
    t.save()
End Sub

Advantages over Open XML SDK or Other Such Options

1. You need to have a good understanding of Open XML schemas for using these SDKs.
2. You are stuck with one particular product when using them.
3. You need them installed on the target machine for use. Here, just drop the Rahul.Office assembly into the bin folder, or copy the code files to your project.

I am not trying to play down these SDKs. They are very powerful. But, I believe they are too powerful to be used in regular development, unless you have a good understanding of schemas.

Still To Be Done

I needed to deliver the functionality quickly to a client, and assembled the original code quickly. Since then, I have made some enhancements to it, that I have updated in the article.

I am using lots of regex, and probably they can be tweaked to increase performance (although I have been able to Token Replace large documents in virtually no time). There are many more features or metadata extensions that could be added. Support for Excel and Calc, at least, is desired. Currently, Replacement in Header/Footer sections is not supported (see the Comment below for details. More replacement options, the list would never end.

I will try to take time out and enhance this. But, right now, as it stands, the code should satisfy many requirements in a majority of the cases.

History

• 22^nd December 2008: Initial post
• 22^nd May, 2009: Article updated

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Why not playing with Rtf Ernest Bariq 15:05 28 Jun '09   Hi, I've tryed un nice lib from codeproject called NrtfTree NRTFTree - A class library for RTF processing in C#[^], why not trying to make another class to manage Rtf as it is a structured doc ? there is also Writing Your Own RTF Converter[^] but it's more complex .: Ernest Bariq :. __________________ http://titus31.no-ip.info/jupiterZ Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink A better approach might be ContentPlaceHolders? deloford 22:07 22 May '09   Nice article, but I think a better approach is to use ContentPlaceHolders? There is a free tool that allows you to generate the content control xpaths. 1. Add Content Controls into the Word 2007 document 2. Add a custom XML file into the Word 2007 document (zipped file) 3. Map the content controls to elements in the XML document (using XPATH and no code) 4. Demonstrate that changing content in the Content Controls will update the custom XML file and visa-versa. http://blogs.msdn.com/modonovan/archive/2006/05/23/604704.aspx Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink 5.00/5 (1 vote) Re: A better approach might be ContentPlaceHolders? Rahul Singla 22:39 22 May '09   I just checked that out. Yes, that is a good option. However, I still find mine a better one with respect to productivity, flexibility and extensibility. There is a comment on the bottom of that blog post. I am quoting it here: "Is there anyway to get the formating of the word document in XML file? What I mean by that is, I followed this example step by step and got to the XML file which do contain all the data coming from MS Word content controls but it loses all the formating (Bold, underscore, links etc...) is there any way to get the formating also?" I am already preparing to extend my approach to support replacement in Headers/Footers and to support Excel/Spreadsheet. It's just a matter of time. Anyways, thanx for pointing that out. It surely is an option to consider seriously. Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink Re: A better approach might be ContentPlaceHolders? [modified] deloford 4:31 23 May '09   Agreed, that is an issue if you are trying to force formatting from your data into the document. However, the majority of situations it is acceptable to allow data to be formatted by the user (think of most CSV mail merge situations). If required, a simpler approach might be to use the Word Object Model to listen for ContentControlBeforeContentUpdate to overide the data binding process and load your XML data as RTF (or whatever custom markup you like) You could also explore programmatically generating BuildingBlocks (and the corresponding BuildingBlockContentControl) which can contain all sorts of word content. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb258119.aspx[^] Having said all that I havent tried these approaches and it may be that your (neat) solution turns out to be easier in the end but if I was starting a project on this now I would explore these approaches especially if I needed to retrieve user data after modification. Here is the free tool I mentioned: http://dbe.codeplex.com/[^] A good starter: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb510135.aspx[^] modified on Saturday, May 23, 2009 9:41 AM Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink 5.00/5 (1 vote) Re: A better approach might be ContentPlaceHolders? Rahul Singla 7:20 23 May '09   I had a quick look at the Urls you pointed to. And I must say, the approaches are compelling (also requiring a considerably higher degree of understanding of the Office system & its markup). But definitely, those are the one I myself might turn to, if I found my approach lacking for a situation. However, I have made it pretty clear in the article that this utility is not a substitute for Office XML SDK, or other approaches that MS has provided for processing Office documents programatically. Rather, it is a quick, intuitive and productive approach for generating dynamic pre-formatted Office documents from data in the database, reports, or other such common tasks, with a major selling point of having complete abstraction from Office, its internals & markup. Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink Replace in Headers and Footers ElsaWood 5:46 22 May '09   Great article! Thank you so much for all your work and for sharing it with us! Tokens in the headers and footers are not replaced. Has anybody come across this and found out a solution? Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink Re: Replace in Headers and Footers [modified] Rahul Singla 7:10 22 May '09   Thanx. Well, check this out after some days. I have updated the code for some minor glitches and have asked the CodeProject team to update the article. It might take some days for the CodeProject to update it. Regarding the Header/Footer issue, I probably should have mentioned in the article, that Header/Footer replacement is actually not supported as of now. There are multiple reasons and complexities for this. To describe a couple: 1) If you check out the Office document formats, Headers/Footers are actually stored as separate Xml files in the zip file, separate from the main Content area. This would mean considerable increase in complexity in handling Tokens spread across multiple files in the main zip file, and ensuring each one gets replaced correctly. 2)There is no intuitive way from an Office document perspective to logically combine the different areas (Header/Content/Footer) and present them as a single unit for Token replacement. I have been thinking of providing functions like replaceInHeader() etc. But owing to my schedule, I have not been able to work forward much on this one. I really want to take time off, and make this more versatile looking at its application areas for myself, and the community. modified on Sunday, May 24, 2009 11:38 AM Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink Re: Replace in Headers and Footers [modified] Rahul Singla 6:49 24 May '09   Hi ElsaWood, I am pretty serious about the usability of this article, as an approach for Dynamic production of Office documents. And now, I have made significant enhancements to the code to progress in the direction that I have promised in the article. This update now support Token Replacement in Word Headers & Footers, just as you desired. As I have mentioned in the article, I assembled this code the first time in pretty much haste to support a client requirements. For this update, I had to refactor it in many terms to provide extensibility to the code & allow future enhancements with not much of breaking changes (I hope so!!!). So, this update incorporates many breaking changes. But all of them relate mainly to the background processing in the code. If you have been following the sample provided in the download without tweaking the actual code, it should not be too difficult for you to adapt to this update. Mainly there have been some class renamings, and support for Headers & Footers meant, you now need to call functions like: doc.header.replaceToken(...) or doc.footer.replaceToken(...) or doc.body.replaceToken(...) I have uploaded the Updated code at Rapidshare. It would be useful for me if you can use it, and report any bugs you find (I have tested it on my end). I would update the code in the article as and when you certify the functionality to be working fine. http://rapidshare.com/files/236933306/OfficeTokenReplacement.zip.html[^] modified on Monday, May 25, 2009 1:35 AM Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink Right thing Bülent 1:01 29 Jan '09   Hi, thak you for the tut. It was nearly the same, i thought about and wanted to build up. Did you worked further for Excel? Please contact me direktly at cenk21 atsymbol gmx.de I will test your code and will fix the leaks. Afterword i sent it to you to update your nice article. Kind regards Bülent Tiknas Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink Re: Right thing Rahul Singla 18:48 29 Jan '09   Hi Bulent, I myself need the functionality extended for Excel. I started examining & researching OO SpreadSheet's & Office Excel Xml formats. But I had to leave up the work in between due to some engagements that would keep me occupied for nearly a couple of months. I understand that it would be hugely beneficial to provide support for Excel. But I would not be able to do it right now. I will update and enhance this code as soon as I get time. In the meanwhile, your input would be welcome. Regarding testing, I have already done some myself, and have found the Regexs used perfect in all test cases, and boundary conditions. However, I would be all ears to listen to any fixes if there are any. Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink 2.00/5 (1 vote) list of docs bidulle 3:55 9 Jan '09   Hi, thank you for your code but I encounter a hudge problem... First I migrate your code to C# (If you want it ...) I'm trying to merge documents and replace tokens. I've tried first with AltChunk to merge all the docs and replace tokens but it put the docx inside the docx zip file and your regex tool can look inside. so I process all the sub documents before merging them to the main but I have hazardous time results (because the processed doc is still hanged by something, I suppose it's the regex) How can I dispose your tool. I've tried to implement IDisposable and set the XDocument to null but its the same. some time I have to wait 30 sec. before going on to the next doc! Help me me please Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink Re: list of docs Rahul Singla 22:46 9 Jan '09   Hi bidulle. Excuse me for not being able to understand your problem exactly because of confusing English you have used. I am describing your problem in my words. Please correct me if I am wrong. You have sub-documents on which you use this tool to replace tokens. Then, you are trying to merge them to produce a single new document. Well, I have again checked my code. My code does NOT lock the document when it is processing it. As I said, all processing is being done in memory. However, you must call the Save() method if you want to persist back the replaced content to the original file. The file is completely free after the call to Save() method. I have been able to open the processed file with MS Word immediately after the call to Save() method. I see no reason why the file should be locked up. As an aside, remember you need to create a new TokenReplacement object for each sub-document you are processing. You pass in the document path to its constructor, so a single object is able to process only a single document. If you still find the file to be locked up, try using Unlocker (http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/[^]) to see which Process has locked up your document. Make sure your file is not opened in Word. Word locks the file in exclusive non-shareable mode. Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink Re: list of docs Ernest Bariq 17:02 10 Jan '09   Hi It's me bidule but from my home login (Ernest) What I do is: File.Copy(args[i], String.Format(tempFile,i.ToString()), true); using (TokenReplacement t = new TokenReplacement(String.Format(tempFile, i.ToString()), "{$", "}")) { t.replaceTokens(list); t.save(); } // here is the problem /// merger.DocumentMerging(argsUnit); // end File.Delete(String.Format(tempFile, i.ToString())); when I try to manipulate the sub doc in my merger, File.Open throws me an exeption: it's still being hanged by some thing ( I only see the regex) so I have to loop inside my method to wait for the availability of the sub doc here is the time results for sub docs availability Docs\temp1.docx : 1 cycles, en 0mn 0s 408ms Docs\temp2.docx : 885 cycles, en 0mn 0s 228ms Docs\temp3.docx : 723 cycles, en 0mn 0s 243ms Docs\temp4.docx : 433 cycles, en 0mn 0s 207ms Done. That means I can go inside my merger.DocumentMerging(argsUnit) method but I have to wait inside before working with it while (!finish) { try { using (FileStream fileStream = File.Open(sourceFile, FileMode.Open)) { chunk.FeedData(fileStream); } finish = true; } catch { //System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(100); } I++; } .: Ernest Bariq :. __________________ titus31.no-ip.info Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink Re: list of docs Rahul Singla 19:36 10 Jan '09   Hi Bidulle cum Ernest I just cannot believe it that I made this mistake. I am almost paranoid about releasing resources. I found the reason & the solution to your problem. Refer the OfficePackage.vb file in the solution. It's saveContent() function looks like follows: Public Shared Sub saveContent(ByVal filePath As String, ByVal entryPath As String, ByVal encoding As Text.Encoding, ByVal content As String) Dim zipFile As New ZipFile(filePath) Dim entry As ZipEntry = zipFile.GetEntry(entryPath) Dim c As CompressionMethod = entry.CompressionMethod Dim newEntry As New ZipEntry(entryPath) newEntry.CompressionMethod = c zipFile.BeginUpdate() zipFile.Delete(entry) zipFile.Add(New StringDataSource(content, encoding), entryPath, c) zipFile.CommitUpdate() zipFile.Close() End Sub Notice, that second last line of this function, zipFile.Close(). In the original source code posted above, I had forgotten to Close() the zipFile opened. Closing it resolves your problem. To be more precise, just add the following line: zipFile.Close() at the end of OfficePackage class' saveContent() function. I would make this change to the code posted above so that other's don't face this problem. Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink Re: list of docs Ernest Bariq 17:04 10 Jan '09   the time elapsed is the time I hae to wait ... sorry .: Ernest Bariq :. __________________ titus31.no-ip.info Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink Interesting Nyarlatotep 1:46 30 Dec '08   Long time ago I have had the same needs and I have resolved to use RTF format. It has the same 'problems' like multiple word runs (plain text is interleaved by rtf command tokens). Because of this, managing repeated rows has been a nightmare and I have had to use continue section breaks during template editing to 'force' word runs to reset and restart after the section break. Now I'm very curious about your solution: it seems very good. Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink Why aren't you using the OpenXML SDK? Itay Sagui 6:40 22 Dec '08   http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb448854.aspx [^] http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=ad0b72fb-4a1d-4c52-bdb5-7dd7e816d046&displaylang=en[^] Itay Sagui  |  Tzunami Inc Tel: +972-9-9507479  |  Mobile: +972-54-5343800  |  Email: itay@tzunami.com Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink 3.67/5 (2 votes) Re: Why aren't you using the OpenXML SDK? SoulStone-BR 10:49 22 Dec '08   As the author have already said: Advantages over Open XML SDK or other such options 1. You need to have a good understanding of Open XML schemas for using the these SDKs. 2. You are stuck to one particular product when using them 3. You need them installed on the target machine for use. Here, just drop the Rahul.Office assembly into the bin folder or copy the code files to your project. Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink 1.00/5 (1 vote) Re: Why aren't you using the OpenXML SDK? Itay Sagui 12:53 22 Dec '08   I'm afraid I don't agree with any of those points (though I must admit that I missed them when first reading the article): 1. Using the OpenXML doesn't require you to understand the schema any better than manually modifying the XML (which is what the article is all about). It even makes it easier, since you can work with an object model, and don't need to work directly with the XML 2. You are stuck with one particular product anyway - Office - since you are editing Office documents. 3. The OpenXML is a single assembly, which you can drop just as easily as any other assembly. Anyway, that was just a question... Itay Sagui  |  Tzunami Inc Tel: +972-9-9507479  |  Mobile: +972-54-5343800  |  Email: itay@tzunami.com Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink 5.00/5 (1 vote) Re: Why aren't you using the OpenXML SDK? Rahul Singla 19:02 22 Dec '08   Hi Sagui, have a look at the following blog post from Brian Jones, a Program Manager for Office: http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2008/10/06/open-xml-format-sdk-2-0.aspx[^] In particular, look at the following section (directly quoted from there): What Can't the Open XML SDK do? Before we get into the design of the SDK I want to point out a couple of key points of what the SDK will not be able to do: * The Open XML SDK is NOT a replacement for the Office Object Model; and provides no abstraction on top of the file formats o You need to understand the structure of the file formats to leverage the SDK, it doesn't hide it from you * The SDK does NOT provide functionality to convert Open XML Formats to and from other formats, like HTML or XPS * The SDK does NOT guarantee document validity of Open XML Formats when developers use the SDK or if the developer chooses to manipulate the underlying xml directly o We are working on providing validation functionality in subsequent CTP releases of version 2.0 of the SDK * The SDK does NOT provide application behaviors such as layout (ex. pagination of WordprocessingML documents) or recalculation functionality That should make one point as to you should have an understanding of Open XML schemas. There are other more important points I mentioned above: 1) There's no direct Token Replacement option. You would need to write custom code extensively for that. 2) Your Token might be split into multiple runs by Office. That would make it a lot more difficult for replacement. 3) Productivity. Do you expect each & every developer to understand and open XML files for something as basic as Token replacement?? 4) Intuitive. Some people would still use Open XML SDK. And indeed, this article is not a replacement of the SDK, as I have already disclaimed above. But this article is about allowing a normal developer to leverage Office products in day-to-day programming in an intuitive & productive way. Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink 3.50/5 (3 votes) Re: Why aren't you using the OpenXML SDK? Rahul Singla 19:08 22 Dec '08   Itay Sagui wrote: 1. Using the OpenXML doesn't require you to understand the schema any better than manually modifying the XML (which is what the article is all about). It even makes it easier, since you can work with an object model, and don't need to work directly with the XML 2. You are stuck with one particular product anyway - Office - since you are editing Office documents. Regarding point 1 above, see the sample usage code above. You are completely abstarcted from Office schemas, as well as the underlying XML by this assembly. Regarding point 2, just replace this in sample code: Rahul.Office.MS.Word.TokenReplacement with Rahul.Office.OO.Writer.TokenReplacement Nothing else changes. Your code is now working on Token Replacement in Open Office documents, hiding the complete details of OO schemas & XML. As far as I know, there's no SDK available for processing OO documents. Sign In·View Thread·PermaLink 5.00/5 (1 vote)

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