What's New in Aspose.Words for .NET 8.0.0

• Nested mail merge regions are supported.
• Microsoft Word's mail merge settings and data source are preserved.
• FlatOPC is supported.
• Watermarks, background and WordArt are rendered to PDF, XPS and printed.
• Print tickets are added to generated XPS with paper size, orientation and paper tray information.
• DOCX to DOC and other formats conversion is improved. Many formatting loss issues resolved.
• Many improvements in the OpenDocument Text (ODT) module.

Nested Mail Merge Regions

Yes, you now can just build a template document like this:

MERGEFIELD TableStart:Orders
...
MERGEFIELD TableStart:OrderDetails
...
MERGEFIELD TableEnd:OrderDetails
MERGEFIELD TableEnd:Orders

and then call

doc.MailMerge.ExecuteWithRegions(myDataSet);

and Aspose.Words will do its magic to produce an order document. Then you can of course

doc.Save(myStream, SaveFormat.Pdf);

etc.

Aspose.Words' support for nested mail merge regions allows you to generate reports from master-detail (parent-child) data with ease. If your data is inside a .NET DataSet object that has proper DataTable and DataRelationship objects set up, then all you need to do is pass a DataSet to the Aspose.Words mail merge engine. It will automatically figure out data relationships and generate a report with the required data. On the other hand, it is also easy to implement your own mail merge data source interfaces IMailMergeDataSource and IMailMergeDataSourceRoot to generate a report from any data source be it a LINQ query, XML file or a set of business objects. We will be writing more in the blog and in the documentation about this great new feature. This release is "nested mail merge V1.0" and includes only the features mentioned above. There is a lot more we plan to add to the reporting functionality in Aspose.Words in the future. Feel free to submit us your requests via the Support Forums.

Mail Merge Settings are Preserved

This might look like a small feature, but surprisingly it has been requested by many customers.

A Microsoft Word document can have a set of mail merge settings in it. These settings include the data source connection information, included/excluded recipients, mapped data fields and so on. Aspose.Words now preserves all this information in DOC, DOCX, WordML during load, save and conversions. You can also programmatically create or remove a Microsoft Word mail merge data source in a document. Programmatically creating a mail merge data source is great if you intend to give the document to users so they can insert merge fields into a document. Having a data source in a document will make the data source fields appear in a drop down box in Microsoft Word so the user will be able to insert them as "predefined" fields easily and without mistakes.

Flat OPC is Supported

An Office Open XML (OOXML) documents is a package that conforms to the Open Packaging Convention (OPC). Most of the OOXML documents you come across are DOCX files which are just ZIP files. The ZIP file is a container for an OOXML package. The Flat OPC format is an alternative way to package OOXML documents. A FlatOPC file is an XML document as opposed to a ZIP file. Aspose.Words now fully supports Flat OPC. Use the new LoadFormat.FlatOpc and SaveFormat.FlatOpc values to load, save and convert.

Watermarks, Document Background, WordArt Rendering

These features are of course essential for rendering of many business or official documents and we are happy to finally deliver them. All document watermarks, page background as well as WordArt text are now rendered to PDF, XPS and printing. WordArt with complex curves and gradients might be output in a simplified way, but still, in many cases it will look pretty much like in Microsoft Word.

DOCX to Other Formats Conversions and Rendering is Improved

"Font Calibri has changed to Times New Roman", "Font size has changed from 11 to 10", "Paragraph spacing is lost" and many others... Fixed! We have traced many of these issues down to some advanced features, such as document themes, document default formatting and also table styles were not fully supported in Aspose.Words during conversions. Aspose.Words for .NET 8.0.0 addresses many of these issues.

Breaking API Changes

There are some minor breaking API changes in Aspose.Words for .NET 8.0.0:

1. Classes CompatibilitySettings, ViewOptions, ZoomType, ViewType, WriteProtection have moved from the Aspose.Words to the new Aspose.Words.Settings namespace. These classes are rarely used and if you experience a compilation problem, just add "using Aspose.Words.Settings;" to the source file.
2. The IMailMergeDataSource interface has a new method GetChildDataSource added. This change will only affect you if you have implemented a custom mail merge data source. It is easy to resolve, just add the GetChildDataSource method to your implementation and return null.

All Fixes

Aspose.Words for Java 3.3