TX Text Control .NET Server 14.0 ships with a new class that allows documents to be easily merged. A template is a collection of content, including variable merge fields. A merge field is a named region in a document that is possibly formatted. During the compilation process, the actual field values are substituted for the corresponding text fields. These templates can be created using MS Word, OpenOffice or the new shipped TX Template Designer.
The MailMerge class is a .NET component that can be easily created dynamically or dropped on a web or Windows form. The documentation explain in detail how to create such an application in very easy steps. In the remainder of this blog post, I would like to explain the advantages of this component.
TX Text Control .NET contains a collection for the TextFields or ApplicationFields, which are compatible to the fields of MS Word. All steps that are necessary to merge a template using TX Text Control .NET are encapsulated in this new component.
All you have to do is to load a template, pass the merge data and to save the merged document.
Prev: 
Next: mailMerge1.LoadTemplate(Server.MapPath("template.docx"), TXTextControl.DocumentServer.FileFormat.WordprocessingML);
mailMerge1.Merge(mergeData, true);
mailMerge1.SaveDocument(Server.MapPath("results.pdf"), TXTextControl.StreamType.AdobePDF, saveSettings);The MailMerge component matches the contained merge field names automatically with the database column names and merges the template with the appropriate data automatically. For each data row in the passed data table, a document is created. These documents can be saved separately or they can be merged into one document that can be saved at once.
After each data row, an event is fired that enables you to save the current document. The following illustration shows the template with the merge fields and the ready merged PDF document at the right:
The MailMerge component contains some more nice features. I will be explaining these in my next blog entries. One of these interesting features are repeating blocks. These blocks allow you to define an area in your template that should be repeated based on the number of data rows in a separately passed data object.
Try out the new MailMerge class yourself by downloading a TX Text Control .NET Server trial version now:
http://www.textcontrol.com/en_US/downloads/trials/Feel free to contact me, if you would like to discuss the possibilities.
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Is this only available in the server version of the control, and not in the WinForms version?This is exactly the sort of thing I want to do with the regular ActiveX version. It's hard to see how to do it, based on the
documentation. Can you help? The thing that really concerns me is how to save the merged document (with fields replaced by their
contents) in either a single file, or multiple files (one per row of data).
I would also very much like to be able to put tables of lower-level details into the merge documents, e.g. if I was creating
something like invoices with both header information and detail lines. Any suggestions on that?Hello Eyvind
The MailMerge component is only available in the server version of TX Text Control. The TX Text Control .NET Server is shipped
with a new namespace called DocumentServer. This namespace will contain best practices in the future like the MailMerge class.