Tag Archives: wordapplication

Knowledge Base, WordWriter

How to add page numbers or other fields with WordApplication

Problem

WordApplication does not currently have support for inserting fields other than MergeFields and Hyperlinks. You want to insert a different kind of field, such as the current page number.

Solution

WordWriter has a MergeField class and a Hyperlink class which allow you to programmatically insert those fields. However, those are currently the only two fields which are included in the WordWriter API. In order to insert a field such as a page number into a newly generated document in WordApplication, you must first create a document with Microsoft Word and copy the field from there.

Inserting Footers with Fields

If you wish to create a footer which includes a field such as the page number, you must first create a document in Microsoft Word. Add all the text, fields, and formatting that you wish to appear in the final document to this file. For the purposes of this article, this file will be called ‘footer.doc’.*

In order to use your newly created footer, you must open the document in your WordApplication and copy the footer into the document you are generating programmatically:

//Create the document you want to insert a footer into
Document doc = wa.Create();

//Or open an existing file, instead of creating one
//Document doc = wa.Open("myFile.doc");

//Open the document with the footer you want to copy
Document footerDoc = wa.Open(Page.MapPath("footer.doc"));

//Get the footers for both documents
Element footerSource = footerDoc.Sections[0].get_Footer(Section.HeaderFooterType.All);
Element footerDestination = doc.Sections[0].get_Footer(Section.HeaderFooterType.All);

//Insert the footer into the destination document
footerDestination.InsertAfter(footerSource);
In this way, you can copy the footer into a newly generated document or one that was opened from a different file. For more information about retrieving footers or headers and inserting them as Elements, see the documentation for the Section and the Element classes.

Inserting Headers with Fields

Copying the header is very similar to copying the footer, except that you would insert the header Element instead of the footer. So if you have a document called ‘header.doc’ that you wish to copy the header from, you can say:

//Create the document you want to insert a header into
Document doc = wa.Create();

//Or open an existing file, instead of creating one
//Document doc = wa.Open("myFile.doc");

//Open the document with the header you want to copy
Document headerDoc = wa.Open(Page.MapPath("header.doc"));

//Get the headers for both documents
Element headerSource = footerDoc.Sections[0].get_Header(Section.HeaderFooterType.All);
Element headerDest = doc.Sections[0].get_Header(Section.HeaderFooterType.All);

//Insert the header into the document
headerDest.InsertAfter(headerSource);

Inserting Fields into the Body of a Document

If you instead want to insert a field into the body of the document along with programmatically generated content, you can retrieve only the Field Element from a pregenerated file. For example, if you want to insert a ‘Date’ field into the body of a document, you must first create a new file in Microsoft Word. Add a Date field to the body of this new document by going to Insert->Field and choosing Date. Save the document. For the purposes of this article, the file will be called ‘datefield.doc’.

In your WordApplication, when you want to insert the field, you will open the datefield.doc document, retrieve the field, and insert it into your own document:

//Open the document with the date field in it
Document fieldDoc = wa.Open(Page.MapPath("datefield.doc"));

//Get the date field from the body of the document. We use an index of 0
//because it is the first (and only) field element in the document.
Element dateField = fieldDoc.get_Elements(Element.Type.Field)[0];

//Insert the date field into the body of another document (called 'doc').
doc.InsertAfter(dateField);

In this way, you can programmatically add Microsoft Word fields to a newly generated document. For more information about how to specify what type of Element you want to retrieve from the document, see the documentation for the Elements property of the Element class and refer to the different types of Elements that you can ask for.

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.

Knowledge Base, WordWriter

How to insert HTML into Word documents

Problem

Many customers have rich text data that’s stored in databases as HTML and they need to display the HTML-formatted data in Word documents.

Solution

Using WordTemplate:

The ability to insert RTF and HTML documents into Word documents was introduced in WordWriter 8.0 for the WordTemplate object. For more information, read our tutorial for Inserting an Embedded Document in the documentation.

Using WordApplication:

SoftArtisans has an open source project called HTMLtoWord that allows users to insert well-formed HTML (XHTML) snippets into Word documents as formatted text. This uses the WordApplication project, so you must have WordWriter Enterprise Edition to use this project.

The project can be downloaded from SourceForge.net. For more information, see Using HTMLtoWord.

Knowledge Base, WordWriter

How to delete extra pages from a document with WordApplication

Problem

Extra pages in a template document can sometimes be useful in making a template more versatile. For instance, a company could use a generic employment contract with unique pages describing each position, but with common pages on company policy.

This post covers how to delete extra pages from a template document using WordApplication

Solution

In order to delete unneeded pages from a template document, you should use bookmarks to identify the pages that you wish to delete. Then, use the Bookmark.DeleteElement() method, which is inherited from our Element object. Calling DeleteElement() on a bookmark in WordWriter will delete not only the bookmark, but its contents.

1. Place each extra page within a bookmark in your template file. Remember to include the page break within the bookmark so that it is removed when you remove the bookmark.

2. Before filling the template with data, open the file using the WordApplication object and delete the extra pages using the Bookmark.DeleteElement() method.

Document doc = wa.Open(@"..\\..\\templates\templatefile.doc");
Bookmark bm = doc.get_Bookmark("Bookmark");
bm.DeleteElement();
3. Pass the Document back to the WordTemplate object and bind with data.

Knowledge Base, WordWriter

How to get a list of bookmarks from a Word document

Problem

You want to get a list of all the bookmarks in a document using WordWriter.

Solution

WordTemplate

The WordTemplate.Boomarks will return the names of all the bookmarks in a WordWriter template. This can be useful for binding data to the template with SetRepeatBlock, which requires the name of the bookmark for the repeatblock.

WordApplication

Use the GetElements method to retrieve all the elements of a particular type. In this case, the Element.Type is “Bookmark”.

For example, to retreive an array of all the bookmarks in a document:

Element[] eArray = document.GetElements(Element.Type.Bookmark);
//Get a handle on the first bookmark in the document
Bookmark bookmrk = (Bookmark)eArray[0];
If you need to retrieve a particular bookmark, use Document.GetBookmark(string), which returns the Bookmark object with the specified name.

Knowledge Base, OfficeWriter, WordWriter

Documents generated by WordWriter do not print

Problem

Using WordTemplate or WordApplication, the document is generated and opens in Word. But when you try to print the file in Word, nothing happens. There are no error messages, the printer just does not start printing.

Solution

There are several possible reasons for why a WordWriter-generated document will not print:

Document contains an image that is set to “Behind text”

If the template file contains an image that is formatted to be behind text, then this issue was addressed in WordWriter 3.9.2. The recommended solution is to upgrade to the latest version of WordWriter.

If upgrading is not an option, then a possible workaround is to set the image as a watermark, so it will appear behind the text of the document:

Word 2007/2010:

  1. Go to the Layout tab.
  2. In the Page Background tab group, go to the Watermark dropdown.
  3. Select Custom Watermark.
  4. Select Picture watermark.
  5. Select the image that you want to appear behind the text.

Word 2003:

  1. Go to Format
  2. Go to Background
  3. Go to Printed Watermark
  4. Select the image that you want to appear behind the text

MS Word Background Printing Option

There is a known issue with some WordWriter-generated documents and the Background Printing option in MS Word. If your WordWriter-generated documents do not print or trying to print those documents results in error messages, try turning off Background Printing as described in this post.