We have forms that are Word versions of official government forms in PDF format. We have inserted merge fields into these forms and have been using Aspose.Words version 4.2.0 to merge our customers’ data into these forms.
We have not had any problems until recently when some of our customers reported the issue that “a table in this document has become corrupted” when opening a document after a merge operation.
After investigation, we have determined that this problem arises after the customer’s Microsoft Office is updated to version 1903.
I have tested with the latest Aspose.Words version (5.2.0) to see if it would resolve the issue. It seems it might, at least it does with a simple document. However, as our license has long been expired, the limitations with the evaluation version makes it hard to ascertain that it will handle more complex documents correctly.
In one of our documents, the offending table is located on page 9. Unfortunately the evaluation version truncates page 3 and above. So what I did is copy the contents of page 9 into a separate document and test that. I’m seeing the following issues:
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The merge fields are processed correctly but if a field is missing in the data source, the field name is preserved in the resulting document; it should have been removed. For example, if I have in the template document a field named “A1” and the recordset (we use the ExecuteADO method) does not contain an “A1” key, the document will show “A1”. If however I create a document from scratch, insert a table with merge fields in each cell, any merge field with no value supplied will be removed.
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In my test document I have table A followed by table B, but in the resulting document table B will appear before table A. Maybe this is caused by the warnings that the evaluation version inserts in the document, but I’d like to be sure.
We certainly would be willing to upgrade to fix the 1903 issue, but we would like to be certain that it won’t create more problems.