Tag Archives: OfficeWriter

Knowledge Base, WordWriter

How to use SetCultureInfo with date functions and formatting

Problem

The SetCultureInfo method allows you to override the server’s default locale when generating a new Word file from a template with WordWriter. This is especially useful for the display of dates. It is important, however, to understand that any date formatting must be applied to the Word Template Merge Field instead of in the ASP.NET script.

Solution

To see a standard field code for a DateTimeObject merge field, right-click on the field, and choose Toggle Field codes:

 {MERGEFIELD DateTimeObject}

You can see that there are no formatting switches applied to this field. In this situation, the default format of “yyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss” (4-digit year, month, day, military hour, minute, second) will be applied. To set the culture info to a particular language, such as German:

CultureInfo deDe = new CultureInfo("de-DE");
wt.CultureInfo = deDe;
For more information see our documentation on WordTemplate.CultureInfo.

Best coding practices

Unexpected date formatting behavior can be prevented by keeping the following in mind: The Word template is expecting to receive the date as a System.DateTime object. If it is passed a String instead of a System.DateTime object, it will not be able to apply the formatting codes and apply the correct Culture settings.

ExcelWriter, Knowledge Base

How to check if a cell is empty

Solution

A cell can contain a value and/or a formula. To check if a cell is empty use the Cell.Value and Cell.Formula properties to look for the following conditions:

XLS Files XLSX and XLSM Files
Language Cell.Value Cell.Formula Cell.Value Cell.Formula
C# null (empty string) (empty string) OR null (empty string)
VB.NET Nothing Nothing (empty string) OR Nothing Nothing
ASP/COM * (empty string) (empty string) (empty string) (empty string)

 

Example

//--- myCell is a Cell object 
if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(myCell.Value) && string.IsNullOrEmpty(myCell.Formula))
{
//--- Cell is empty
}


Knowledge Base, WordWriter

How to apply a banded style on a table with WordTemplate

Problem

In a template document created in Word 2003, table styles behave correctly when new rows are added by WordWriter. However, if a new template document is created in Word 2007 with the new table styles, these styles do not persist as expected when saved in the binary (.doc) format. This can easily be demonstrated with the banded coloring styles which are displayed as alternating row coloring.

After processing with WordTemplate, the additional rows in the table will have a solid background color instead of a banded styling. MS Word itself shows the same behavior when adding rows to a table styled with the new 2007 styles and saved to the 97-2003 binary file format (.doc). This appears to be a compatability issue at the file format level, with Word not fully supporting the new table styles in the binary file format.

Banded styles behave as expected with OOXML (.docx) files, which have been supported by WordTemplate since version 4.0.

Solution

Option 1: Save the file as .doc before applying table formatting

When Word 2007 opens a .doc file, it opens in compatibility mode which only makes available features that are supported for that format. However, when Word 2007 creates a new document, it doesn’t know which format the user will choose to save it in, so all options are shown, including those which aren’t compatible with the binary format.

The easiest solution would be to save the file as 97-2003 binary file format (.doc) before applying any table formatting. Once the file has been saved, only the styles compatible with the binary format will be available and you can use them freely. If you have already created a template file with 2007 formatting, simply reapply the styling to the tables after the file has been saved in binary format.

Option 2: Use the OOXML file format

Alternatively, with WordWriter 4.0 and above, the other good solution is to use the OOXML (.docx) file format. The resulting populated table will be as you expect when using that file format. The feature is supported in the file format level, so you can place your data marker in such formatted table and it will expand and maintain the selected style.

Knowledge Base, WordWriter

How to use merge documents together with Document.Append

Problem

Prior to WordWriter 4.5.0, the only way to merge entire documents was to use InsertAfter. Starting in WordWriter 4.5.0, Document.Append() was introduced as an improved way to merge documents together.

This post covers the behavior of Document.Append().

Solution

The default behavior of Document.Append() is creating a section-page break between the original document and the inserted document:

 documentOne.Append(newDocument);

To merge the two documents so they appear continuous, simply change the section break type to be continuous:

int mySectionsCount = thisDocument.Sections.Length;
thisDocument.Append(otherDocument);
thisDocument.Sections[mySectionsCount].Break = Section.BreakType.Continuous;

Example:

For a more complicated example, here we want to insert into our current work document (thisDocument) a header from one template document and body content from another template document. Note that we want both the header and the body to be on the same page, so we change the type of the section break at the tail of the header to continuous.

// adding header document
Document headerDocument = Wapp.Open(_headerSource);
thisDocument.Append(headerDocument);

// adding body document
Document bodyDocument = Wapp.Open(_bodySource);
int sectionCount = thisDocument.Sections.Length;
thisDocument.Append(bodyDocument);
thisDocument.Sections[sectionCount].Break = Section.BreakType.Continuous;
Note that if the initial document (the one you append into) is empty, we get a blank page at the beginning of the document. To fix that we need to delete the first empty section:

 thisDocument.Sections[0].DeleteElement();

All other InsertAfter operations that don’t deal with sections should stay unchanged.

Knowledge Base, WordWriter

Inserting a subreport into a WordWriter report

Problem

You need to insert a subreport into a larger report using WordWriter.

Solution

Option 1:

Generate each subreport separately and then use the WordApplication API to merge the subreports into the larger report. The subreports could be appended to the main report document with Document.Append, or if you need to insert the subreport into a particular place, you can use Element.InsertAfter or Element.InsertBefore.

Option 2

Flatten your data set and use WordWriter Grouping and Nesting. Grouping and Nesting would allow you repeat sections of a document for a particular subgroup in the data.

NOTE: Both these solutions require WordWriter Enterprise Edition. For more information about the features offered in Enterprise Edition, check out the OfficeWriter Change Log page.

ExcelWriter, Knowledge Base

Optimizing ExcelApplication performance to reduce memory or time usage

Problem

Your program, which uses the ExcelApplication object, is using more memory than you would like or is taking too long to generate a report.

Solution

The Best Pratices with Large Reports article in our documentation discusses how to optimize for large ExcelApplication reports by reducing memory or run time. It includes, but is not limited to:

  • What to avoid when referencing cells, inserting rows or columns, and applying styles
  • Certain methods are known to be memory intensive, such as AutoFitWidth
  • Ways to improve performance by changing how and when data is imported

There are also code examples that compare inefficient code and code that was improved by the recommendations in the article. These code examples are split up into Memory Related Performance Issues and Time Related Performance Issues.

Knowledge Base, WordWriter

Tools to convert Word documents to PDF

Problem

WordWriter does not support converting between file formats. This includes converting between DOC/DOCX and PDF. We generally recommend that you use a 3rd party component to convert Word documents to PDF files.

Solution

Note: Most Word to PDF converters require Office to be installed on the server in order to render the Word components before generating the PDF file. Microsoft does not recommend this:

Microsoft does not currently recommend, and does not support, Automation of Microsoft Office applications from any unattended, non-interactive client application or component (including ASP, ASP.NET, DCOM, and NT Services), because Office may exhibit unstable behavior and/or deadlock when Office is run in this environment.

For more details, see Considerations for server-side Automation of Office.

Word Services for SharePoint

If you are using SharePoint Server 2010, then one possibility is to use Word Services to perform the format conversion. This entails writing code to convert a Word document that is in a list or a document library in SharePoint.

This is a blog post that describes Converting Word Documents to PDF using SharePoint Server 2010 and Word Services. In this case, Word Services automatically converts a document to PDF when the Word document is added to a list.

Rainbow PDF

Rainbow PDF by Atenna House has a server-based converter that does not require Office on the server. However, since Office is not installed, this component does not have the ability to render all Word document elements. Word documents rendered to PDF with Rainbow PDF experience loss of fidelity.

EasyPDF

EasyPDF by BCL Technologies has a a PDF Creator SDK as well as server-side solutions that can convert Word documents to PDF. EasyPDF does require Office to be installed on the server, however it carefully manages the instances of Word to avoid hitting the pitfalls that normally happen when automating Office on the server.

Knowledge Base, WordWriter

How to use merge fields with a bar code format

Problem

You create a Word document containing a merge field formatted with a Bar Code font, such as Code 39. You use the WordTemplate class to process the document. However, in the generated document, the merge field is populated with text in the Times New Roman font. The problem is illustrated in the figures below:

Merge field
Formatted merge field
Output

Solution

A bar code field must begin and end with a delimiter character. For the Code 39 font, this required delimiter is represented in human-readable text as the * character.

When you create the merge field in a Word document, insert the * character into the merge field using merge field switches. Then you can format the merge field with a bar code font. The procedure is as follows:

1. From the Word menu, select Insert, Field.

2. In the dialog box, select MergeField and fill in the fields as illustrated in the figure below. Use an appropriate name for Field name.

After you close the dialog box, the merge field should appear as follows:

3. Select the entire merge field and format it with a bar code font, such as Code 39.

In the generated document, the merge field should now contain the text in the bar code font. The following figure shows the results for the string *0123456789*.

To see that this does in fact represent the correct string, you can select the text and choose a different, readable font, or copy and paste the text into a text editor.

ExcelWriter, Knowledge Base

How to apply auto filters with ExcelApplication

Details

Auto filters are an Excel feature that can be applied to a column of data that allows users to select what rows of data they want visible for a given area on a worksheet.

The ability to apply auto filters programmatically with ExcelApplication in XLSX and XLSM files was added in OfficeWriter 8.3. This post covers how to add auto filters with the ExcelWriter API.

Solution

  1. Define the Area that the auto filter will be applied to.
  2. Get a handle on the AutoFilter object for the Worksheet that will have the auto filter.
  3. Set the worksheet’s AutoFilter.Area to the area that was defined earlier.

Here is the code:

Area filter_area = ws.PopulatedCells; //Returns a continuous area of all the populated cells
AutoFilter filter = ws.AutoFilter;
filter.Area = filter_area;
Here is the code in a single line:
ws.AutoFilter.Area = ws.CreateArea("A1:H1");

Additional Resources

To remove the auto filter from a worksheet, use AutoFilter.Clear():
ws.AutoFilter.Clear();
A few things to bear in mind:

  • A worksheet can only contain one area with auto filters. If you set Worksheet.AutoFilter.Area, you will overwrite any existing auto filters.
  • You must specify the entire area that you want to apply the filters to. ExcelWriter will not automatically detect blank rows and columns. We recommend Worksheet.PopulatedCells for getting a handle on all the populated cells in a worksheet.

ExcelWriter, Knowledge Base

How to use ASP.NET MVC with OfficeWriter

Problem

A number of customers have asked about support for ASP.NET MVC. With the introduction of ASP.NET MVC, the method to send OfficeWriter-generated files to the user requires a few more lines of code. In ASP.NET WebForms, OfficeWriter can write directly to the HttpResponse stream via the Save method, allowing for a one-line implementation. In MVC, all the functions from a Controller return an ActionResult, and it requires a different approach to return the file to the user.

Solution

To facilitate file downloads, we need an ActionResult to return the file generated by OfficeWriter. For use in ASP.NET MVC, we need to return our file via an ActionResult for the Controller’s action; the specific type used below for doing that is the FileStreamResult by using OfficeWriter to get a stream of the file.

The overview of what we need to do is summarized in the algorithm below:

  1. Create the appropriate OfficeWriter object.
  2. Get the data into the file, using the various data binding methods like ExcelTemplate.BindData and WordTemplate.SetDataSource.
  3. Process the file.
  4. Save the file to an in-memory Stream (using MemoryStream); check out ExcelTemplate.Save, ExcelApplication.Save, WordTemplate.Save, and WordApplication.Save.
  5. Return the FileStreamResult, set to use the in-memory Stream.

The following is a C# sample that uses ExcelTemplate. This general approach also works for ExcelApplication, WordTemplate, and WordApplication.

public ActionResult Download()
{
if (ModelState.IsValid)
{
var excelTemplate = new ExcelTemplate();
excelTemplate.Open(Server.MapPath("~/Templates/Download_Template.xlsx"));

// get the data into the file
excelTemplate.Process();
var stream = new MemoryStream();
excelTemplate.Save(stream);

// make sure to reset the position because we will be reading it again
stream.Position = 0;
var actionResult = new FileStreamResult( stream, "application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet" );
actionResult.FileDownloadName = "Download.xlsx"; return actionResult;
} return View();
}
The above code would be placed inside a Controller for the Download action. When this action is activated, a file download prompt will appear for the user with the file name that was given to the FileStreamResult.