Question

What I would like to do is to be able to write some hidden marks in the document, so that when the user fills in some information, then I can process each part of the document according to the marks or sections that surrounded it. I’m using .NET, any ideas? Thanks

Answer 1

Take a look at SdtElements tag, OpenXml Sdk and Word 2007 Content Control Toolkit

The essence is:

• Create a Word document that will be your template
• In Word, turn on Developer tab
• In the Developer tab there is a Controls group. Click the “Aa” ones to insert a new content tag, click “Properties” to edit the tag alias and data, turn on Design Mode to see the content tags

The steps below apply if your app can output an XML you would bind to your document:

• Open the Word Content Control Toolkit
• Open the document you created
• Attach an xml in the right-side panel
• double-click on content tags to edit their XPath binding or use drag-drop; see WCCT manual for that

Once you have your template prepared, depending on your actual task at hand you can do many things with these content tags, including:

• replace the custom xml part in your document to update the data users will see when they open it
• use openxml sdk to replace the data without opening it in Word
• use the template to collect data (possible but unreliable, not recommended)
• delete and insert content tags from code via openxml sdk

In your code you can find the content tags by using LINQ queries over OpenXmlSdk objects like so:

var contentTags = document.MainDocumentPart.Document.Body
                .Descendants<SdtElement>()
                .Where(x => x.SdtProperties.GetFirstChild<Tag>() != null && x.SdtProperties.GetFirstChild<DataBinding>() != null)
                .Select(x => x.SdtProperties.GetFirstChild<Tag>().Val.InnerText =="Whatever Tag you're looking for or other condition to match several")
                .ToList();