Catch the Cancel state from the Save Dialog for a MS Word document about to be closed with unsaved changes

Question

I have a Microsoft Word Add-in developed in C#. When a user tries to close a document with unsaved changes, the Save dialog box is shown. Is there a way to capture if the user clicks cancel on the Save dialog?

The DocumentBeforeClose event is annoyingly fired before the Save dialog is shown and it appears an event isn't fired encapsulating the Save Dialog event.

Why I need this: If the user closes the last document, I need to do some clean up on my Add-in tool bar. However, if I do the clean up in the DocumentBeforeClose event and the user clicks cancel, the Add-in tool bar state is incorrect.

Edit/Update:

As Rob Allen suggested, I am now using the ShutDown event to do cleanup of my parent object and the BeforeClose event for pre-close validation of my parent object. My validation needs the document to be saved and tries to do that in a method called by BeforeClose. If the document has never been saved before, the Save As dialog appears. If the user clicks Cancel a COMException is thrown and I catch that. Then the Save/Don't Save/Cancel dialog appears. If the user clicks Don't Save, the ShutDown event is not fired. If the user saves from the Save As dialog, saves from the second dialog, or hits cancel on the 2nd dialog, everything functions correctly.

private void WordDocument_BeforeClose(object sender, System.ComponentModel.CancelEventArgs e)
{
  try
  {
    this.WordDocument.Save();
  }
  catch (System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException a)
  {
    log.Error(a.Message);
  }
}

private void WordDocument_Shutdown(Object sender, EventArgs e)
{
  // Parent cleanup.
}

Rob Allen Rob Allen · Accepted Answer · 2012-09-25T17:39:52

Try the Document Shutdown event instead. Docs here

From the 'Remarks' section:

This is the last event to be called in a Document as it unloads. Use this event for any additional clean up.

In a document-level customization, the application domain for the assembly unloads when the document host item shuts down.

In an application-level add-in, the application domain does not unload when the document host item shuts down. Also, the underlying document object is no more available. To access the document before it shuts down use CloseEvent instead.

Catch the Cancel state from the Save Dialog for a MS Word document about to be closed with unsaved changes

1 Answers