Field DDE is not supported

Aspose.Words Product Family
1

Hello,
I have a critical issue I need to solve and need some assitance. We need to modify a document to add DDE fields with values. The document is passed to another system that opens the doc and reads the DDE fields. This system has been in place for a long time, thus we are really restricted on what our output is.

Document doc =  DocumentBuilder builder = new DocumentBuilder(doc);
builder.InsertField(@"DDE MyApp MyForm FirstName \* charformat \t", "John");

The field is supposed to look like this in MS Word:
{DDE MyApp MyForm FirstName \* charformat \t}
When this is executed we get the error: Field DDE is not supported.
Can you assist in how we can create the field we need as above?
Thanks,
Michael Thomas

2

I have logged this to our defect base as issue #1256. We will try to add support for DDE fields in the next release. I will notify you of the results here in this thread.
I must admit that I have never worked with DDE fields before and I could not find any sensible information on these fields in MS Word help. So could you please provide some info or useful links on them. Also please provide some information on how they could be inserted in MS Word 2003. I don’t see them in the list of the fields provided by Insert | Field dialogue.
Best regards,

3

I’m trying to find documentation too. We’re only doing this to support document exchange with a legacy app. It looks like it’s just like creating any other form field, like MERGEFIELD, but use “DDE” for the fieldtype. Additional parameters are DDEAppName and FieldName. based on the Aspose interfaces and that “DDE” is an enumerated FieldType, I thought this was going to be a really simple task.
Creating DDE fields is not in the Word Help or in the GUI, but support for DDE fields still exists in the product.
We don’t require actually making a DDE connection to a host app, we just need to get fields into the document.
Any idea when this next release could be available? Would this be a 4.x version?
Thanks,
Michael

4

We will try to add the support for this in 4.0 release. Can you please attach some sample documents with DDE fields. We will use them for research.
Best regards,

5

I appreciate your effort on this. I’ve attached a very simple, but working document.
Thanks,
Michael

6

Sample code using Office Automation to insert a DDE field:

ActiveDocument.Fields.Add _ 
Range:=Selection.Range, _ 
Text:="DDE " + theAPP$ + " " + theFORM$ + " " + theCODE$ + fmt$ + " \* charformat \t", _ 
PreserveFormatting:=False 
Selection.TypeText Text:=" "
7

Thaks for additional info. I will keep you informed about how the work with this issue goes.
Best regards,