Version 2.0 has finally been released. This release brings many new features, most notably PDF output and Document Object Model (DOM). While PDF output was the main focus while developing version 2.0, DOM has been created as a by-product. Nonetheless, DOM is regarded as the first class feature and will play a major role in the future of Docentric Toolkit.

New namespaces

Docentric Toollkit 2.0 now has two new namespaces:

• Docentric.Documents.Reporting
  This is in fact just the renamed existing Docentric.Word namespace and represents a minor breaking change. We put all the existing functionality (of Docentric Toolkit 1.5) inside this namespace. The APIs haven’t change much, except for two added GenerateDocument overloads which accept SaveOptions. You will use them to specify the output format other than .docx.
• Docentric.Documents.ObjectModel
  A completely new namespace containing a completey new set of APIs for programmatic document manipulation.

Fixed Document Output support

As metioned before the major benefit that the new version brings is the PDF format for the generated documents. More precisely, we added the support for Fixed Document formats and currently PDF and XPS are supported. In the near future we will add other popular formats, such as bitmap formats (png, jpg, bmp, gif).

The Fixed Document rendering produces PDF and XPS documents with high fidelity by converting a Word (template) document first into DOM and then it saves DOM to a selected Fixed Document format. In its current state it is still not capable of converting all advanced Word constructs/objects such as charts, shapes, OLE objects and some other advanced Word objects. In the comming months we will mostly be focusing on perfecting the rendering engine and will be gradually adding new features, so you can expect a lot to happen around PDF/XPS document rendering in the near future.

Document Object Model

DOM is in fact a whole new namespace full of APIs that will allow you to create new or modify existing flow documents, such as Word, using programmatic approach. It features a lot of classes and methods for document manipulations and you will be able to use them for different document processing tasks:

• Create new or modify existing document.
• Extract specific content from a document, such as images or text.
• Combining and merging multiple documents together.
• Performing Find/Replace.
• Update dynamic fields, such as Table Of Contents (TOC).

The current DOM is a bit limited in terms of constructs and objects found in MS Word. For example, there is not support for charts, some dynamic fields, OLE objects and other more advanced features found in MS Word. Nonetheless, regarding the supported features, the current DOM APIs closely and accurately model MS Word features and tend to be as flexible and powerful as possible. Even if a feature isn’t supported today, we will most likely implement it in a near future. If you miss a feature, let us know about it. As always, your requests will most certainly be given high priority on our TODO list.

We encourage you to download the new version, play with it and give us some feedback. We would love to hear what you think about it!

About the Author

Jure Leskovec