topic Re: Flex integration with MS Word 2003 in ArcGIS API for Flex Questions

Flex integration with MS Word 2003

grahamcooke — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 17:31:39 GMT

Does anyone know if it is possible to easily pass values out of flex and into a word document in order to populate a .dot file created in Word 2003?

I was thinking that maybe i would need to pass the values out to webservice and do the word integration in the service but is there any other method I could use to do this that anyone knows of please?

the values to be passed out would be values that the user has input on a widget (initially) but future implementations may require results of spatial queries to be passed to other applications in the MS office suite.

Any ideas/ pointers/ links / samples greatly appreciated!

thanks,

Graham

Re: Flex integration with MS Word 2003

Anonymous User — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 18:12:32 GMT

With office 2003 there is support for Microsoft Office XML, which allows you to create word and excel documents as xml (later versions of office support other document types and a different standard) which will open in office as that specific type.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_XML_formats

If you save a word or excel document as xml you can open it in a text editor to see the mark up.

There are also sdks:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa214923(v=office.11).aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb448854.aspx

Re: Flex integration with MS Word 2003

grahamcooke — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 09:42:41 GMT

Hi Michael,

Sorry for the delay in replying. After posting this, i went off and attempted to get this to working via a .NEt webservice which accepts the values from flex and then generates the word document by placing the data in bookmarked fields. This works fine if the webservice is running on my localmachine, but the minute i put the webservice on the server, it fails. I just end up with an instance of word running on the server and no document visible on the client. Having read around the subject a bit more i have found that MS advise against server-side automation of office applications.

So this brings me to back to where I started and to this thread. If i go down the xml route (which is quite unknown territory to me as I am not overly familiar with this), will i still encounter serverside issues? Will I have to look for the document on the client machine and can i still open it, pre-populated with the data from the flex application, from Flex using the methods you have talked about?

hope you can help

cheers