How to Open MS Word file for read-only

Aspose.Words Product Family
1

When I use Aspose.Words to open a Word document that is currently open in Microsoft Word, it throws an exception.

Certainly, if I would want to modify the file, it would not make sense to open it if it is already open in MS Word. However, often I just want to open a file for reading, and this should not interfere with an already-open instance of the file. That is, I’d like a way to open a DOC or DOCX file as “ReadOnly”, such that Aspose will read in the full data of the file, without needing to obtain write-access to the file.

Is this possible in the current version of Aspose.Words? If not, would it be possible to add this functionality please?

2

Hi Avi,

Thanks for your inquiry. When you open a document with Microsoft Word application, it locks the document for editing and when you try to load the same document into Aspose.Words’ DOM, it throws the following exception:

System.IO.IOException: The process cannot access the file 'C:\Temp\...' because it is being used by another process.*

To workaround this you can load the document using a stream and specify FileShare parameter which allows you to open the file even when it’s locked for editing. Please see the code below:

// The specified file can be opened in MS Word when opening it with Aspose.Words here.
string fileName = @"C:\Temp\in.docx";
// Open the document.
FileStream docStream = new System.IO.FileStream(fileName, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read, FileShare.ReadWrite);
// Create Aspose.Words Document from stream
Document doc = new Document(docStream);
// Close stream
docStream.Close();
// Do something with the document.
// Save the document.
doc.Save(@"C:\Temp\out.pdf");

Best regards,

1 Like
3

Thanks! This worked perfectly. This was very helpful.