Creation of mail merge template files

Aspose.Words Product Family
1

I am considering purchasing aspose.word. I understand that it does not come with a document viewer/editor. I want to give my users the ability to create/modify their own mail merge template files and include merge fields from my database, which will be hosted by a 3rd party hosting company.
I’m curious to know if others have done this, and if so, how they accomplished it.
Thanks.
Steve

2

Hello

Thanks for your request. Yes you are right, Aspose.Words is a class library for processing Word documents programmatically; it does not provide any user interface for editing your documents. In your case I see two variants:
The first one: End user should download a document, open this document using MS Word, insert fields and upload back to server.
The second one: You can create a web form, where end user will be able to choose needed fields. Then, for example, you will be able to generate a template programmatically depending on the data from the web form.
Best regards,

3

Thanks for the reply. I have considered your first option - having the end user download the document and insert the fields. Is there a straightforward way of having the available merge fields in the document so that the end user can use them?
I don’t want to have the end users download a document, convert it to a mail merge document, browse for a data source and then start adding the merge fields. For one thing, the data source wouldn’t exist on their computers. I’d have to programmatically create another file - perhaps an Excel file or a CSV file - that contained the available fields. Then the end user would have to select this file as the data source for the mail merge document. This doesn’t really sound like a feasible solution.
Thanks again for the help.
Steve

4

Hi Steve,
Thanks for your request. You are right, you can attach a data source to your template, in this case user will be able to select fields from the list.
https://forum.aspose.com/t/62072
But, unfortunately, MS Word does not understand remote data sources, so the data source file should be available on the end-user’s PC.
Another way is just allow user to insert field like described here:
https://docs.aspose.com/words/net/mail-merge-template/
But in this case, customer should manually type names of fields.
Best regards,

5

A post was split to a new topic: Define list of mail merge fields available for template