Mergefield Calculation

Aspose.Words Product Family
1

Scenario:
We have a merge field defined as: { MERGEFIELD phone # “(000) 000’-'0000” }
In the data source, the value for phone is: (734) 123-4567

Actual behavior (Aspose.Words):
Aspose interprets the value as a mathematical expression and evaluates it, returning:
-(000) 000-5178

Issue:
Aspose.Words appears to treat the value as numeric and performs subtraction due to the dash in the phone number, even though the format switch is meant to render it as a string. This behavior is causing phone numbers to not output correctly on the post-mailmerge document.

Is there any way to get around this automatic calculation?

2

@Robert343 I think you should simply remove the number format switches in your merge field. In this case the value will be inserted as is into the template.

3

This is not a solution. We need the formatting. Is there any aspose solution to this?

4

@Robert343 To make the formatting work it is required to pass the value as a number. You can use IFieldMergingCallback to remove parenthesis and minus characters from the value to make it possible to parse as a number. For example see the following code:

Document doc = new Document(@"C:\Temp\in.docx");

doc.MailMerge.FieldMergingCallback = new MyFieldMergingCallback();
doc.MailMerge.Execute(new string[] { "phone" }, new object[] { "(734) 123-4567" });

doc.Save(@"C:\Temp\out.docx");

private class MyFieldMergingCallback : IFieldMergingCallback
{
    public void FieldMerging(FieldMergingArgs args)
    {
        if (args.FieldName == "phone")
            args.FieldValue = ((string)args.FieldValue).Replace("(", "").Replace(")", "").Replace("-", "").Replace(" ", "");
    }

    public void ImageFieldMerging(ImageFieldMergingArgs args)
    {
        // Do nothing
    }
}

in.docx (14.0 KB)
out.docx (11.1 KB)

5

Thank you. That is more along the lines of what I am looking for. I expanded on this a bit with this code. Do you see any issues with this code below? I’m trying to accomplish this for any of the numeric switches.

string fieldCode = args.Field.GetFieldCode();

if (fieldCode.Contains(@" \# ") == true)
{
    string input = args.FieldValue.ToString();
    string result = string.Empty;
    bool allowDecimalCheck = (input.Count(c => c == '.') == 1);
    bool allowNegativeCheck = (input.Count(c => c == '-') == 1 && input.Trim().StartsWith("-") == true);
    for (int i = 0; i < input.Length; i++)
    {
        char currentChar = input[i];

        if (char.IsDigit(currentChar))
        {
            result += currentChar;
        }
        else if (currentChar == '-' && allowNegativeCheck == true)
        {
            result += currentChar;
        }
        else if (currentChar == '.' && allowDecimalCheck == true)
        {
            result += currentChar;
        }
    }

    args.FieldValue = result;
}
6

@Robert343 The code looks good to me.