Capturing XML and Inserting XML in a Word Document

In almost any solution you build in Word, there will be times that you either want to capture the content from part of the document, or insert some additional content at some location in the document. One example scenario I've seen for this are clause libraries where folks want to store a collection of document fragments that can be dynamically inserted into a new document based on what the user is writing about.

In Word, it's easy to both store these fragments as well as insert them into new documents. I already talked a bit about how the cfChunk element makes it easy to insert these fragments if you want to do it on a server (or anywhere that the Word OM isn't available). If you do have your solution running in Word though and have access to the OM, you can use the .xml property and .insertXML method off the range object.

range.xml

Take any document and open it up in Word 2003. Make a selection that you want to store, and then bring up VBE (Alt + F11). Go to the immediate window (Ctrl + G) and type msgbox selection.range.xml and press return. The message box can't display the whole output, but you can see that you are returned a string that represents the selection you made in the WordprocessingML format. You can take this string and store it off as it's own XML document if you want to store it and re-use it in other documents. You can also load it into an XML DOM and make modifications to it, then reinsert it into the document. The way you insert the XML is through the .insertXML method:

range.insertXML

Take the same document and place your cursor somewhere that you want to insert some rich text. Go back into the immediate window in VBE, and type selection.Range.InsertXML ("<foo>My text</foo>") and press return. You can see that your text (and the XML tag <foo>) have been inserted in your document where your cursor was. If you don't see the <foo> tag, just press CTRL + Shift + X to turn the XML tag view on.

In this example we inserted some data-only XML. You can also insert WordprocessingML if you want to apply formatting. With the insertXML method you can insert as much rich content as you want. It could be an entire other document if that's what you wanted to insert. This method gives you the ability to allow the users of your solutions to quickly build up a document from preexisting content.

-Brian

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 19, 2005
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  August 19, 2005
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  August 23, 2005
  How do I do this... I have a large document and I want to insert smart tags (ns0:documentSection) in the document on click of a button on the action task pane.
  
  say the document is like
  
  Heading 1
  some text
  Heading 1.1
  some more text
  Heading 1.2
  some more text
  Heading 2
  text here.
  
  I want to tag this document as follows
  
  <documentSection>
  Heading 1
  some text
  <documentSection>Heading 1.1
  some more text
  </documentSection>
  <documentSection>Heading 1.2
  some more text
  </documentSection>
  </documentSection>
  <documentSection>
  Heading 2
  text here.
  </documentSection>
  
  I want this so that I should be able to delete heading 1.1, heading 1.2 and all the text related to it if the user deletes heading 1 (using a tree control on the document action pane).
  
  
  Thanks,
  Ankesh
• Anonymous
  August 23, 2005
  Ankesh - Using the tree control in the document actions pane for this is OK but there is no context, you can not see the heading numbers etc. You can select the range of the XML tag and all its contents and then press delete to remove the section. If your sections are longer than a screen you will not see the section numbers and will have to scroll to make sure you have selected the correct content. It sure would be nice if the view was scrolled to the beginning of the selection not the end when using the task pane to select XML nodes. It would also be nice if there was some context there as well. All you will see is a long list of <documentSection> tags.
  
  All that aside this is how you do it:
  The hard part is finding all the ranges where you want to insert your tags. You will need a combination of range.xml and range.insertXML in something like this:
  range.insertXML(range.XML, c:insertDocSect.xls)
  insertDocSect.xls is a transform you need to make that should add a <ns0:documentSection> inside of <w:body>.
  This basically is the same as selecting a range and 'applying XML' as you do from the right click context menu when a schema is attached. Of course you will have to insert a toplevel tag around the entire document before inserting more than one <ns0:documentSection> tag. I think you can do this with out having a schema attached. This can be done as a smartDoc or just a Word Plug-in.
• Anonymous
  August 24, 2005
  Ankesh - The way to do it without a transform is to use this:
  Dim node As Word.XMLNode = range.XMLNodes.Add(Name:="documentSection", Namespace:="http://yourSpaceHere")
  
  To add attributes use this:
  Dim attr As Word.XMLNode = node.Attributes.Add("some_name", Nothing)
  attr.NodeValue = "some value"
  
  Still the hard part is finding all the ranges.
• Anonymous
  September 05, 2005
  I'd like to post some my observations upon InsertXML method. I develop an automated job place for people processing rather large documents in WordprocessingML format (up to 40 MB). So, some operations take all document content in XML format, perform some modifications and insert fixed content back into Word by InsertXML method. Approximately after 500 megabytes have been passed through InsertXML, this method throws an exception, and almost nothing can be peformed in Word...
  
  Is it a kind of InsertXML's volume "limit" ?
• Anonymous
  September 12, 2005
  InsertXML only seems to apply to a single range. But what if I have a document (.doc) with a schema defined and with some text outside the XML-tags and want to fill the document with business data within the tags. Do I have to assing every node and range with its XML or could I in any way assign a xml-datafile as a datasource to the document?
• Anonymous
  November 08, 2005
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  January 20, 2006
  I would like to use selection.insertxml(str, transform) to insert xml into my word document. str is a string with some xml information like str="<tag1>some text</tag1>". I have an xsl file containing a wordml transformation that I would like to apply to str when inserting into the document. When I try to do this I get compile errors in my vba macro. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
• Anonymous
  January 26, 2006
  Markus, this will be possible in Office 12. See this post: http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2006/01/09/CustomXML1.aspx
  
  Brad, we're actually working on improving this in Office 12. It should be set up so that you'll only get the styles that are in use in the range you selected.
  I'm glad you're enjoying the posts!
  
  Carmenm, I'm not sure what the problem is. Have you tried opening the XML file in Word as a seperate file and applying the XSLT? You should try to narrow it down a bit more and see if it's an issue with your XSLT, with Word, or with the insertXML method.
  Sorry I can't help more.
  
  -Brian
• Anonymous
  February 06, 2006
  Hi Brian,
  
  Is there a way on the XML side to completely replace the WordML of a target by the WordML of a source document via automation.  
  
  What I'd like to do is (a)  receive a WordML string from someplace that represents a complete wordML document, (b) Create a new Word document via automation; and (c) use insertXML() method to completly replace everything about the empty document (the target)  with everthing in the source WordML string.   It does not work--just wondering if the basic idea is feasible, or some alternate  approach, exists--I'd like to edit WordXML documents locally without using local files in the process.    Thanks
• Anonymous
  February 13, 2006
  Jesse,
  I'm curious why you're saying that it's not working now. You should be able to do insertXML on document.range and it should replace everything. It is working, but just not quite as you expect?
  
  -Brian
• Anonymous
  June 12, 2006
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  July 26, 2006
  I have Word 2003 on my XP SP2 notebook that came as part of Microsoft Office Basic 2003. I've also installed the Office 2003 PIA to use the insertXML method to insert XML into a word document. When I use this method I get the following error "This method or property is available only in Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003". Is this truly a requirement to use this method or is this a bug.