My company has recently moved from Aspose.PowerPoint.dll to Aspose.Slides.dll latest version.
I looked in the "whats new" section and initially found nothing that would cause any problems. Later on after a new release of out software, errors started to occur. The specific error was caused by us inserting newline characters into a Paragraph object. So I searched the forum and found that this is now illegal in Aspose.Slides.dll.
My questions are:
1. Where can I read about this change? It should at least be mentioned in the history of the product so you dont have to go through the forum to be aware of the change.
2. Is there any documentation on changes like these that are particularly error prone?
Dear flodpanter,
Probably, we have missed it, but you should be able to track changes in the What’s New section of every release of Aspose.Slides. We are sorry for inconvenience.
Thanks for the quick reply. Allow me to elaborate a bit.
It seems like a strange strategy to disallow newline characters. My guess is that most of the time the Aspose.Slides is used to display dynamic data, often decided by user input. Im hoping that you will supply thorough information about these kind of "component degradings". Heres what I found.
1. Theres no information about the change in the "whats new" section
2. Theres no information in the API reference http://www.aspose.com/documentation/file-format-components/aspose.slides-for-.net-and-java/aspose.slides.paragraph.text.html
3. Furthermore, the API states that the Text property of the Paragraph object is of type string, hence you should be able to apply all characters to this property that can fit into a string object. In my opinion it is therefore a BUG in your software until you change the the text property to e.g. a ParagraphText property of type ParagraphText and update the API accordingly.
Im looking forward to your reply.
Aspose.Slides (and old versions PowerPoint) never allowed new line or carriage return characters inside paragraph. If you used it then you created wrong broken presentations in most cases. To create new line you should always use new Paragraph and nothing else.
TextFrame.Text can parse string with new line characters but several paragraph objects will be created anyway.
It is simply NOT TRUE when you say "Aspose.Slides (and old versions PowerPoint) never allowed new line or carriage return characters inside paragraph".
It WAS allowed in Aspose.PowerPoint and it worked fine. I have used in in several applications and browsing the forum suggests that others have too.
Also, I am hoping that you will answer the question in my previous post regarding the string type of the Paragraph.Text property.
Ok, I will tell one more time. New line characters never allowed in paragraph but Aspose.Slides didn’t check it. Generated presentations were broken in case such characters added. We explained it too many times but people used it anyway so it was disabled in the code to stop producing presentations incompatible with PPT file format.
Do you mean third question? Paragraphs and Portions shouldn’t parse text by design.
Parsing and splitting of text should be done by application which uses Aspose.Slides.
That is more flexible and give you more control but in the same time you have more
responsibilities and should understand how to work with text right.
Thanks for clearing that out.
Would it be possible to "promote" these frequent user errors to something like "Common errors" or something like this to avoid similar problems in the future?
Yes, you are right. We should update our FAQ in the documentation more frequently.