Preserving or copying font settings during field value replacement

Aspose.Words Product Family
1

Since UpdateField doesn’t seem to support CREATEDATE fields I used the workaround suggested in this thread https://forum.aspose.com/t/123329 and modified it to work with CREATEDATE.
The problem with this workaround is that I can’t get it to preserve the font settings for the field in the original document.
How can I get Aspose.Words to either preserve or copy the font settings from the original field value or is it possible to update the CREATEDATE field in some other way?
Regards,
Patrik

2

Hi Patrik,

Thanks for your request. Could you please attach your document and expected output here for testing? I will check the issue on my side and provide you more information.
Best regards.

3

Here is a test document containing two CREATEDATE fields with different font settings. I first change the created time using getBuiltInDocumentProperties().setCreatedTime() and then I want the CREATEDATE fields to be updated.
If I use Document.UpdateFields() they are not updated and if I use the workaround code from the forum thread above they are updated but the font settings are somehow changed so both fields have the same settings.
Regards,
Patrik

4

Hi

Thanks for your request. You can try using the following code to achieve this:

private static void updateCreatedDate(Document doc, Date newDate) throws Exception
{
    // First, we should update Document property.
    doc.getBuiltInDocumentProperties().setCreatedTime(newDate);
    // Then we should update values of CREATEDATE fields.
    // DocumentBuilder will help us to achieve this.
    DocumentBuilder builder = new DocumentBuilder(doc);
    // We should get all field starts to find CREATEDATE fields.
    NodeCollection starts = doc.getChildNodes(NodeType.FIELD_START, true, true);
    for (int i = 0; i <starts.getCount(); i++)
    {
        FieldStart start = (FieldStart) starts.get(i);
        if (start.getFieldType() == FieldType.FIELD_CREATE_DATE)
        {
            // To update field, we should update text between FieldSeparator and FieldEnd nodes.
            // Search for FieldSeparator
            Node currentNode = start;
            while (currentNode.getNodeType() != NodeType.FIELD_SEPARATOR)
                currentNode = currentNode.getNextSibling();
            // Remove old value of field.
            while (currentNode.getNodeType() != NodeType.FIELD_END)
            {
                if (currentNode.getNodeType() == NodeType.RUN)
                    ((Run) currentNode).setText("");
                currentNode = currentNode.getNextSibling();
            }
            // Move DocumentBuilder cursor to the cuurent node
            // and insert updated value.
            builder.moveTo(currentNode);
            builder.write(newDate.toString());
        }
    }
}

But note, this method does not aware formatting switches specified in your fields. I think, you can modify the method to do so. Hope this helps.
Best regards.