Working with Open XML Documents using JavaScript

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Open XML and JavaScript
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It is becoming more and more common for developers to write rich client-side applications using AJAX, and these applications often want to implement some form of Open XML functionality.  Your application could automatically generate a word-processing document or a spreadsheet based on user interactions in your application.  While it certainly is straightforward to implement Open XML functionality server-side, when the application mainly is running client-side, it doesn’t make sense to require an interaction with the server to do document generation or modification.

Further, now that we can write Windows 8 Metro-Style applications using HTML5 and JavaScript, we very well may want to include interesting functionality in those applications.

In addition, server-side JavaScript is now becoming much more common.  Being able to work with Open XML documents in JavaScript means that we do not need to build a hybrid application that uses C# or Java to do the document manipulation, and then use some form of interop technique so that the server-side JavaScript can deliver the application to the user.

The following screen-cast demonstrates two proof-of-concept examples:

The code is attached to this blog post.

There is an Open XML / JavaScript Resource Center, where you can find all of the content that we have put together on using Open XML from JavaScript.

This screen-cast refers to two external links:

Adobe Flex SDK: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/flex-sdk-download.html

JSZip: http://stuartk.com/jszip/

Download – Example Code