OpenXML Merging Documents - How to See Content using Productivity Tool

Question

I'm fairly new too and struggling with OpenXML. We basically have a Word template and depending on the number of records the user selects in a website we have, we pull the records out of the database and use the template to create a word document. Then we assemble all these documents into one master Word document which is served up to the user. We use OpenXML and altchunks to do this:

string altChunkId = "AltChunkId" + itemNo.ToString();
MainDocumentPart mainPart = myDoc.MainDocumentPart;
AlternativeFormatImportPart chunk = mainPart.AddAlternativeFormatImportPart(                                     AlternativeFormatImportPartType.WordprocessingML, altChunkId);
using (FileStream fileStream = File.Open(createdFileName, FileMode.Open))
{
  chunk.FeedData(fileStream);
  fileStream.Close();
}
AltChunk altChunk = new AltChunk();
AltChunkProperties altChunkProperties = new AltChunkProperties();
MatchSource matchSrc = new MatchSource();
matchSrc.Val = true;
altChunkProperties.Append(matchSrc);
altChunk.AppendChild(altChunkProperties);
altChunk.Id = altChunkId;
mainPart.Document.Body.Append(altChunk);
mainPart.Document.Save();

When I open one of the template documents in the Productivity tool I can see all the elements which I'd expect:

enter image description here

However, when I look at the 'master' document, all I can get down to is the MatchSource:

enter image description here

What I don't understand is why I can't see the paragraph tags etc in the master document that's produced. Can anybody help me understand how I would see this information? Is there something wrong with the document structure?

UPDATE: I found this information "One important note about altChunk – it is used only for importing content. If you open the document using Word 2007 and save it, the newly saved document will not contain the alternative format content part, nor the altChunk markup that references it. Word saves all imported content as paragraph (w:p) elements. The standard requires this behavior from a conforming application." So if you open the file, save it, then re-open it, it doesn't have the chunks in it.. and you can get access to everything. — UKGirl

user8375562874527 user8375562874527 · Accepted Answer · 2015-06-04T13:15:39

That's because of the way altchunks are merged to the master document. altchunks won't change the master document's openxml markup but it does add the file as embedded resources. Think of it as if you are attaching something to an email but not adding it to the actual email body text. There are some third party solutions like Document Builder that will merge the document by modifying the master documents markup. Then you can see what you are expecting in the productivity tool.

OpenXML Merging Documents - How to See Content using Productivity Tool

1 Answers