Replace fill-in field by mergefield

Aspose.Words Product Family
1

Hi,

Let me start by situating my problem :

I have a lot
of old word templates that used to be populated with data using Word’s
mail merge function. Some of these documents contain Fill-In fields.
Merging these documents the old way, Word kept popping up a textbox,
asking to fill in the required fields. (As it should be doing)

Since
I want to use these templates with Aspose.Words, I need some way for
the functionality of these Fill-in fields to remain. Since all the
templates have to be registered in our system, I thought it would be
easy to find and replace any Fill-in fields at the time they (the
templates) are registered and stored.

Example: I have a template containing 3 Fill-in fields.

  • Fill-In Shoe size?
  • Fill-In Lenght?
  • Fill-In Weight?

When I register this template in our new system, I need the Fill-in fields to be replaced by Mergefields.

  • MERGEFIELD FI_SHOESIZE
  • MERGEFIELD FI_LENGTH
  • MERGEFIELD FI_WEIGHT

I then store the templates and some metadata.
This metadata being :

  • FI_SHOESIZE = Shoe size?
  • FI_LENGTH=Length?
  • FI_WEIGHT=Weight?

Now I can pass the data needed along together with my request to perform a mail-merge.

My question:
How can I achieve this using Aspose.Words? Is there an easy way to change the FieldType?

Thanks in advance

Regards

Matthias

2

Hi
Thanks for your request. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to change type of fields. To achieve this, you should find your FILLIN fields, remove them and insert MERGEFIELDS instead. I created a simple code that demonstrated the technique:

// Open document
Document doc = new Document("C:\\Temp\\in.doc");
// Create DocuentBuilder. It will help us to modify fields
DocumentBuilder builder = new DocumentBuilder(doc);
// Get collection of FieldStart nodes
Node[] starts = doc.getChildNodes(NodeType.FIELD_START, true).toArray();
// loop through all field starts and search for FILLIN fields
for (int i = 0; i < starts.length; i++)
{
    FieldStart start = (FieldStart)starts[i];
    if (start.getFieldType() == FieldType.FIELD_FILL_IN)
    {
        // Every field in MS Word document consists of FieldStart, FieldSeparator, FieldEnd nodes
        // And Runs that represent field code and field value (displayed text)
        // If you need to remove the field you should remove all these nodes
        Node currentNode = start;
        // Get Field code
        while (currentNode.getNodeType() != NodeType.FIELD_END)
        {
            Node nextNode = currentNode.getNextSibling();
            // Remove current and move to the next node.
            currentNode.remove();
            currentNode = nextNode;
        }
        // Insert new field, but first move DocumentBuider cursor to the end of the field.
        String name = "MergeFieldName";
        builder.moveTo(currentNode);
        builder.insertField(String.format("MERGEFIELD %s", name), String.format("«%s»", name));
    }
}
// save output document
doc.save("C:\\Temp\\out.doc");

Hope this helps.
Best regards,

3

Hi

Thanks a lot, exactly what I needed!

Regards

Matthias

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