How to create a Word doc from a template using Content Control Data Binding with OpenDoPE

1
votes

I have a Word template, complete with fonts, colors, etc. I am querying a database and retrieving information into a POJO. I want to extract the relevant info from said POJO and create a Word document as per my template's directives.

The doc will have tables and graphs so I need to use Content Control Data Binding. As I understand it, I'll have to do the following to achieve this

  1. Modify the Word template to add content controls
  2. Transform the POJO into an XML object (template?)
  3. Use ContentControlMergeXML to bind the XML data to the Word template

Unfortunately, I can't find a good step-by-step example of this anywhere. Nearly all of the links in the docx4j forum lead to broken GitHub pages

My questions

  1. How can I use OpenDoPE to add tags to my Word template? I'll need to preserve style, so I want the correct OpenDoPE version
  2. Should the POJO be converted into an XML object or document?
  3. Is there an end to end example of this entire process so I can follow along? (preferably with source code)
1
javams-worddocx4jword-contentcontrol

1 Answers

2
votes

Content control data binding essentially injects an XPath value into a content control in the Word document.

That XPath is evaluated against an XML document, so yes, you need to convert your POJO into XML.

Authoring

Now, there are 3 different OpenDoPE Word AddIns which you can use to add content controls to your Word document. See the links at https://opendope.org/implementations.html

The most recent one assumes a fixed XML format. So to use that, you'd need to transform your POJO to match that format. (ie use the AddIn to author your docx, then inspect the resulting XML (embedded in the docx), then figure out how to transform your POJO to that).

The older AddIns support arbitrary XML, but are cruder. To use one of these, first convert your POJO to XML (eg using JAXB), then feed the AddIn your sample XML.

Runtime

To bind your XML to a docx "template" to create an instance docx, see https://github.com/plutext/docx4j/blob/master/docx4j-samples-docx4j/src/main/java/org/docx4j/samples/ContentControlBindingExtensions.java

You can run that sample code against the sample docx + data; you can take a look at the docx to see what the content controls look like (they bind a custom xml part in the docx, so unzip it to see that)

ps the GitHub links broke as a result of a recent code re-org. GitHub isn't smart enough to dynamically maintain them :-( See https://www.docx4java.org/downloads.html for downloadable sample code.