Very early, TX Text Control already supported merge fields to merge database content into a template to create print-ready documents. These fields were accessible through the TextFields collection and were not compatible to MS Word formats like DOCX, DOC or RTF.

Since version 14.0, TX Text Control supports importing and exporting MS Word fields contained in such documents. Since then many developers changed the field handling to the new MS Word compatible ApplicationFields. These fields are 100% compatible to MS Word and cover most commonly used fields like the MERGEFIELD, FORMTEXT or DATE field.

The only drawback with this is that the old templates are not longer usable. Contained TextFields are not accessible through the ApplicationFields collection. We decided not to mix these fields, but to keep them completely separated in different classes and collections. That guarantees full backwards compatibility.

I received many requests regarding this dilemma. It is not a good idea to create all templates again from scratch or to replace the fields manually. Therefore, I created a small application that converts such templates automatically.

This little project simply removes the TextFields and inserts ApplicationFields at the same position. You can select a source folder that contains your original templates and a destination folder where these converted documents should be exported to.

It should just give you an idea of how to convert such templates. Feel free to add your own code to the project to handle for example special field properties that should be converted as well.

At least TX Text Control .NET for Windows Forms 15.0 and Visual Studio 2008 is required to load this project.

Download the project