Converting HTML Placeholders to Merge Fields
The MailMerge class of TX Text Control uses MS Word compatible merge fields to populate data from various data sources into templates. In order to use legacy templates from other formats, such as HTML, placeholders can be converted into merge fields.
The Mail
A typical legacy HTML template contains textual placeholders like in the following HTML:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8" />
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
<p>This is a sample text with #textfields#.</p>
<p>More #textmarkers# here.</p>
</body>
</html>In order to use the full power of Text Control's reporting engine, those templates should be converted into the TX Text Control internal format or an MS Word format such as Office Open XML (DOCX).
With TX Text Control's API, it is possible to load these HTML documents, find these placeholders and convert them into merge fields that can be directly used with MailMerge.
In order to find the placeholders like in the sample template above, the following extension method can be used to find them using a simple regular expression:
public static class MyExtensions {
public static MatchCollection Find(
this TXTextControl.TextControl tx,
string pattern,
RegexOptions regexOptions) {
// replace the CRLFs with LFs to be compatible with
// TextControl's index
var sText = tx.Text.Replace("\r\n", "\n");
// new RegEx and return the matches
Regex rg = new Regex(pattern, regexOptions);
return rg.Matches(sText);
}
}The extension method extends the Find method of TX Text Control to search for matches based on a given regular expression pattern:
MatchCollection matchedFields = textControl1.Find(@"#(.*)#", RegexOptions.None);In our sample, the template placeholder format is:
#placeholder#The extension Find method returns a MatchCollection that is then used to select the text in order to create a new Merge
// load a document
textControl1.Load("sample.html", TXTextControl.StreamType.HTMLFormat);
// create a MatchCollection
MatchCollection matchedFields = textControl1.Find(@"#(.*)#", RegexOptions.None);
// loop through all matches
foreach (Match match in matchedFields) {
// select the text
textControl1.Select(match.Index, match.Length);
// create a new field based on the text
TXTextControl.DocumentServer.Fields.MergeField mergeField =
new TXTextControl.DocumentServer.Fields.MergeField() {
Text = textControl1.Selection.Text,
Name = textControl1.Selection.Text.Trim('#')
};
// enable highlighting and the second input position
mergeField.ApplicationField.DoubledInputPosition = true;
mergeField.ApplicationField.HighlightMode = TXTextControl.HighlightMode.Activated;
// remove the text
textControl1.Selection.Text = "";
// insert the field at the current input position
textControl1.ApplicationFields.Add(mergeField.ApplicationField);
}After all placeholders have been converted to merge fields, the template can be used like any other MailMerge template to create documents.
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