Processing all Content Parts in an Open XML WordprocessingML Document

  • Article

In Open XML WordprocessingML documents, there are five types of parts that can contain content such as paragraphs (with or without tracked revisions), tables, rows, cells, and any of a variety of content controls:

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    Blog TOCMain document part

  • Header parts (there can be more than one)

  • Footer parts (there can be more than one)

  • Endnotes (there can be zero or one)

  • Footnotes (there can be zero or one)

There are certain Open XML programming scenarios where you need to process all varieties of parts that contain content:

  • You need to search for specific words in a document, regardless of where those words occur.
  • You need to accept tracked changes anywhere they appear in the document.
  • You need to process content controls anywhere they occur in the document, perhaps to bind them to XML in a custom XML part.

The following example shows how to search for all content controls in a document, regardless of whether those content controls are in the main document part, in the headers/footers, or in endnotes/footnotes.  This example uses LINQ to XML.  If you are using the strongly-typed OM of the Open XML SDK, the code would be identical, except for the code to actually process the content controls.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.IO;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Xml;
using System.Xml.Linq;
using DocumentFormat.OpenXml.Packaging;

public static class Extensions
{
public static XDocument GetXDocument(this OpenXmlPart part)
{
XDocument partXDocument = part.Annotation<XDocument>();
if (partXDocument != null)
return partXDocument;
using (Stream partStream = part.GetStream())
using (XmlReader partXmlReader = XmlReader.Create(partStream))
partXDocument = XDocument.Load(partXmlReader);
part.AddAnnotation(partXDocument);
return partXDocument;
}
}

class Program
{
private static void IterateContentControlsForPart(OpenXmlPart part)
{
XNamespace w = "https://schemas.openxmlformats.org/wordprocessingml/2006/main";
XDocument doc = part.GetXDocument();
foreach (var sdt in doc.Descendants(w + "sdt"))
{
Console.WriteLine("Found content control");
Console.WriteLine("=====================");
Console.WriteLine(sdt.ToString());
Console.WriteLine();
}
}

public static void IterateContentControls(WordprocessingDocument doc)
{
IterateContentControlsForPart(doc.MainDocumentPart);
foreach (var part in doc.MainDocumentPart.HeaderParts)
IterateContentControlsForPart(part);
foreach (var part in doc.MainDocumentPart.FooterParts)
IterateContentControlsForPart(part);
if (doc.MainDocumentPart.EndnotesPart != null)
IterateContentControlsForPart(doc.MainDocumentPart.EndnotesPart);
if (doc.MainDocumentPart.FootnotesPart != null)
IterateContentControlsForPart(doc.MainDocumentPart.FootnotesPart);
}

static void Main(string[] args)
{
using (WordprocessingDocument doc = WordprocessingDocument.Open("Test.docx", false))
IterateContentControls(doc);
}
}