Eric White's Blog

I recently received a very good request for an enhancement to this document generation system.  The request was for a “Repeat” control that works in a similar way to tables, but instead of putting child records into a table, the document generation system generates a repeating section of content. To review, here is what the [...]

Three minute screen-cast that demonstrates changing the schema for simple document generation system that you configure by placing XPath expressions in content controls.

In this post, I review the XPath semantics of LINQ to XML, and show some concrete examples of how I use those semantics in the XPath-in-Content-Controls approach to Open XML WordprocessingML document generation. This post is the 15th in a series of blog posts on generating Open XML documents. Here is the complete list: Generating [...]

In this post, I release V2 of this simple document generation example. I provide a 2-minute screen-cast that shows the document generation process, generating 3000 documents in less than 30 seconds.

Introduces the approach of configuring the document generation process by entering XPath expressions in content controls in a template document.

Flexibility in a document generation system is very important to its usability.  We all know how it works.  You’ve been commissioned by the marketing department to put together a mailing to 50,000 customers.  After doing the work of putting together the template document, the marketing department *will* come ask for changes to the data and [...]

I have completed a preliminary version of this simple DOCX generation system, which you can download, unzip, and try.  You can find the zip file that contains all necessary bits…

I have completed a rough first version of this document generation system that is driven by C# code that you write in content controls in a Word document.  As an intro, I’ve recorded a small screen-cast that shows the doc gen system in action. This post is the tenth in a series of blog posts [...]

In the last post, I explored Text Templates (T4), and determined that using T4 text templates for my code generation needs would add complexity and not yield sufficient ROI (although I did determine that a doc gen example using T4 is interesting in its own right). However, my exploration into T4 text templates yielded one [...]

As I was contemplating the process of generating the C# code that will do the document generation, I was drawn to the idea of using text templates, also known as T4. Text templates are a .NET code generation technology. I have never used text templates before, so I spent a few hours researching them to [...]