Mailmerge and Web Served docx

[mcshazParticipant]

I am writing an application which will allow users to download an openXml file from the web. The file will be certificates of completion for candidates, with various details filled in from the database backing the web app. It is an open source project up on GitHub.

It is fair to assume the users will all have access to Microsoft office 2010. I would like the users to be able to ‘tweak’ the layout of the certificate, with changes being cascaded to all certificates (all participants). One technique which comes to mind is using docx mailmerge. This would require ‘dummying’ a query for the document – i.e.
`
new Query(){ Val = “SELECT \’John Doe\’ AS FullName UNION SELECT \’Jane Doe\’ UNION SELECT …
`
This would involve somehow setting the DataSourceReference to a ‘dummy reference’.

The questions are therefore:

• Has anyone come up with a similar problem, and if so, what solution did you use?
• Is it possible to completely ‘internalize’ a mail merge so that it does not reference any external files or DB connection?

If this is not possible, I will go a pptx file and instructions on how to alter the master slide, however, I personally find visualizing the output harder from a powerpoint Master Slide

[mcshazParticipant]

I ended up going with the powerpoint solution as I couldn’t hack the DataSourceReference property. As such this belongs in PresentationXML, but the code to make the certificates based on a template is up at GitHub link to C# file

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