S
Shannon Hardin
Several years ago, my company developed a document generation engine in VB6.
It installs on the server, and via late-binding, uses the Word object model
to take templates with merge fields and replace the merge fields with
information passed to the document generation component. It has several
advanced features, but that's the general gist of it.
Even at the time we developed it, we knew Microsoft didn't recommend it, due
to stability/interfacing problems. We pretty much solved all of that for
our situation, and it has been happily generating hundreds of documents a
day for several years now, with no particular problems. Licensing is not an
issue in our case, as all users have their own copies of Office on their
workstations, which appears to be a requirement to automate Word on a server
from client requests.
Recently, I came across another product, by Aspose. It claims to be able to
generate Word documents in a server environment without actually having Word
installed on the server. That intrigued me, and since we are looking into
upgrading our document generation component into .NET, I started researching
how it might be possible to generate Word documents from Word templates in a
server environment without actually having Word installed on the server.
Thus far, I haven't been able to figure out how it can be done. After
playing a little bit with the PIAs available for Office XP and 2003, they
both appear to require that Office is installed on the computer where the
program is running. As far as I can tell, aside from the 2003 XML spec, the
native Word file format is still proprietary.
How in the heck is it possible to do this, or does this Aspose company have
some sort of licensing agreement with Microsoft that gives them access to
the native file format?
Thanks,
Shannon
It installs on the server, and via late-binding, uses the Word object model
to take templates with merge fields and replace the merge fields with
information passed to the document generation component. It has several
advanced features, but that's the general gist of it.
Even at the time we developed it, we knew Microsoft didn't recommend it, due
to stability/interfacing problems. We pretty much solved all of that for
our situation, and it has been happily generating hundreds of documents a
day for several years now, with no particular problems. Licensing is not an
issue in our case, as all users have their own copies of Office on their
workstations, which appears to be a requirement to automate Word on a server
from client requests.
Recently, I came across another product, by Aspose. It claims to be able to
generate Word documents in a server environment without actually having Word
installed on the server. That intrigued me, and since we are looking into
upgrading our document generation component into .NET, I started researching
how it might be possible to generate Word documents from Word templates in a
server environment without actually having Word installed on the server.
Thus far, I haven't been able to figure out how it can be done. After
playing a little bit with the PIAs available for Office XP and 2003, they
both appear to require that Office is installed on the computer where the
program is running. As far as I can tell, aside from the 2003 XML spec, the
native Word file format is still proprietary.
How in the heck is it possible to do this, or does this Aspose company have
some sort of licensing agreement with Microsoft that gives them access to
the native file format?
Thanks,
Shannon
