We are working on an application that needs to read Microsoft Word document saved as Blobs in SQL server. These Word documents have to be displayed to the user in Internet-explorer browser. The user can edit these documents and click on the save button that needs to be provided in the browser.
At that point the whole document needs to be saved back as a new Microsoft word document back into SQL-server. Can Aspose.words support this kind of functionality...
Blobs from SQL server can be copied to/from memory streams using .NET code. Aspose.Words can open/save documents from/to memory streams. Thus, exchange of document binary data between Aspose.Words and SQL server is not a problem.
Aspose.Words can write documents directly to http response stream. So that part is not a problem either.
It is the the last step - sending changed document document back to server - that can be tricky. It is technically possible but we don't have a ready-to-use solution for it.
Internet Explorer does not actually open the document, it only provides the container window for MS Word to open it. That makes it hard (if at all possible) to control document saving from IE.
The only way that comes to mind is writing a macro in Word which will save document and send its contents to server using HTTP Post request. This will require some VBA programming, but I am not much of VBA programmer myself and therefore cannot provide any code snippets or expert advice on how to do this.
I think we should develop a demo for the tasks like this, as this kind of functionality is frequently requested. I have logged this task to our defect base as Issue #919.
Thanks for a prompt reply.. We will try with a Word macro...
Has any progress been made on this front? I have a client that would like to do the same thing, but so far, I have not found a way for the client to bring up a WORD document, allow editing, then save it back somewhere that the WEB Server can see it.
Well, Aspose.Words will allow you to merge template with data on a server and send the resulting document to client in HTTP response. As a result, the document will be opened in MS Word or internet browser on a client. And that's about all in this task that Aspose.Words can do for you.
The remaining job of editing and saving is done in MS Word which should be installed on client side. The document can either be saved locally on client's computer and then uploaded back to server via web page which has the fuctinality of choosing the file and sending it to server in HTTP POST. Or user can save the edited document to server directly from Save As... dialog in MS Word. In the latter case you should provide user an accessible network or ftp path that will correspond to a shared directory on your web server.
Best regards,