Question

I am trying to store metadata (basically a unique id) along with each cell of a table in a Word document. Currently, for the add-in I’m developing, I am querying the database, and building a table inside the Word document using the data that is retrieved.

I want to be able to save any of the user’s edits to the document, and persist it back to the database. My initial thought was to store a unique id along with each cell in the table so that I would be able to tell which records to update. I would also like to store some sort of “isChanged” flag within each cell so that I could tell which cells were changed. I found that I could add the needed information into the “ID” property of the cell – however, that information was not retained if the user saved the document, closed it, and re-opened it. I then tried storing the data by adding a data to the “Fields” collection – but that did not work and threw a runtime error. Here is the code that I tried:

object t1 = Word.WdFieldType.wdFieldEmpty;
object val = "myValue: " + counter;
object preserveFormatting = true;
tbl.Cell(i, j).Range.Fields.Add(tbl.Cell(i, j).Range, ref t1, ref val, ref preserveFormatting);

This compiles fine, but throws this runtime error “This command is not available”.

So, is this possible at all? Or am I headed in the wrong direction?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Wound up using “ContentControls” to store the information I needed. I used the “Title” field to store the unique id, and the “tag” field to track whether the field had been changed or not. See this link for more info: http://blogs.technet.com/gray_knowlton/archive/2010/01/15/associating-data-with-content-controls.aspx