Bullets Converting to Question Marks

[kevcorrelation]

Ok here's one for the experts.
We have a very complex doc mgmt system where we utilize Word 2003 XML
features to allow our end users to save a word doc back into our Sql 2k
database.

The basic process is:
1) User downloads the doc through our system
2) User makes changes and clicks a custom button which runs a macro
3) This macro connects to a Web service and sends the XML of the
current document to the server
4) Web service receives the XML and updates the XML in the database

Right up to the point where the Stored procedure updates the XML
everything is fine. If I write the XML to the file system the document
looks exactly as expected.

When I pull the XML from the database and stream it back down through
the browser, somehow all the bullets in the document get converted into
question marks. Very bizarre.

I can't confirm exactly where this occurs. I can't verify if the
database has the correct XML because bullets are stored as WordML tags,
so just looking at the XML is almost useless. All my tests in code may
be inaccurate because I don't know the .NET plumbing that takes place
to actually extract the field from the database and place it into my
VB.NET variable, there could be unicode conversions taking place I'm
not aware of in the ADO.NET plumbing.

Any ideas?

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

You might want to pursue this in a specialized end-user newsgroup, as the
problem is one that can crop up, generally. Usually, the cause is either
damaged file structures (the information is getting lost) or the font for
the bullet symbol isn't present/accessible.

What you might try is to save such a document as a file (still in XML
format) then compare what's in that file to what's been stored on the
server?

Ok here's one for the experts.
We have a very complex doc mgmt system where we utilize Word 2003 XML
features to allow our end users to save a word doc back into our Sql 2k
database.

The basic process is:
1) User downloads the doc through our system
2) User makes changes and clicks a custom button which runs a macro
3) This macro connects to a Web service and sends the XML of the
current document to the server
4) Web service receives the XML and updates the XML in the database

Right up to the point where the Stored procedure updates the XML
everything is fine. If I write the XML to the file system the document
looks exactly as expected.

When I pull the XML from the database and stream it back down through
the browser, somehow all the bullets in the document get converted into
question marks. Very bizarre.

I can't confirm exactly where this occurs. I can't verify if the
database has the correct XML because bullets are stored as WordML tags,
so just looking at the XML is almost useless. All my tests in code may
be inaccurate because I don't know the .NET plumbing that takes place
to actually extract the field from the database and place it into my
VB.NET variable, there could be unicode conversions taking place I'm
not aware of in the ADO.NET plumbing.

Any ideas?

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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[kevcorrelation]

lol, well I'm far from an end user, I'm the senior architect behind the
doc mgmt system, although I can see how it might have appeared I was
just a user of the system. I'm looking for technical solutions to this
problem. The doc mgmt system is built upon a highly complex n-tier
ASP.NET framework. I have an entire project dedicated to the Word
automation.

In my dev environment, my PC is both the server and the client, so
fonts aren't the issue because I'm viewing the same document on the
same computer, just at different stages of the process.

I'll try comparing the XML output using VSS or something, checking by
hand just isn't feasible as I'm sure you've seen the mess of characters
output by WordML