word document, how to edit the right way in asp.net application

Question

I have asp.net app in which I need to edit a word document and than send that document in email as an attachment.

I would like to know what will be the best way to edit the word document and than use it. The document already has data and there are few variables such as "company name", "date", "amount", etc that I am searching in the document and I am replacing them with values from within the code.

The code works great when I am running it locally but from some people I received answers that editing word document on the server shouldn't be the way I am doing now but I need to use either openxml to edit the document or google docs.

Any idea what's the best way to tackle this?

Answer 1

I would vote for OpenXML, but be prepared to spend a good day or two reading how to use the API for .NET and be patient. =)

I remember using this tool -
http://openxmldeveloper.org/resources/dotnet/m/cc/303.aspx - quite a bit to find the relevant parts in the document to modify. You basically load a Word document and can "drilldown" to find the parts you want to modify. You can actually write some pretty clean code to search the document for your textual markers and then replace them with data.

(I hope I understood the question correctly. You said you already had working code, so I wasn't sure what the question was.)

Answer 2

You can use the Open XML Format SDK as per http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd440953%28v=office.12%29.aspx

For what you're doing though, I think your approach is fine.

I have a fair amount of screwdrivers, but if I noticed a lose screw in the stool in front of me, I might just use the knife on the table because it will do the job perfectly adequately and save me a trip to the toolbox. It's not a tool designed for that job, but it is a tool that would do the job just as well and with less effort.

Now, if I decided to set about a day's worth of DIY with only the knife instead of the set of screw-drivers, that would be going to the other extreme. Here I'd have long-ago crossed the line where using the tools designed for a given job would have made my life much easier.

It's just the same with software tools.

One of the very points of XML formats is that we can do simple tasks with it treating it just as text. Yeah, we none of us want to be the guy with a 3-page-long regular expression with which they're trying to parse a complicated XML document, but when the problem naturally breaks down to a simple text substitution, do a simple text substitution.