XML into a .doc?

[nJett]

So here is a fun one (for me anyways)... I'm working on a project part of which involves producing a large document to be printed. This document used to be created by hand and all of the data in it gathered and entered manually. The goal is to centralize all of this data into a DB which we can then use to generate this document for printing and have a web-app interface so we can search the data, update it, etc. (all the standard stuff).

My question:
Can I pull the data from the DB as XML and automagically plug it into a .doc? Even better - can I convert the EXISTING .doc into a kind of template that becomes to final print version when fed the XML data? If so this will make my life SO much easier

Sorry if this is a noob question, I am a noob when it comes to wrestling with XML and all of this related stuff - I do have a prototype set up using AJAX methods (why all the hype? it's not that hard!) to shuffle data out of the DB right now and it just hit me that since the data is coming out as XML it might be easier to plug that straight into a .doc rather than replicate the layout of the existing document in an intermediary format.

 

[notfred]

In theory, yes, you can. In practice, it's nearly impossible to actually get it to work in a useful way. I spent several weeks doing R&D for a similar project at work before we scrapped the idea for being way too complicated.

You have to learn MS Word's XML format. This isn't documented anywhere. You basically have to reverse engineer it by saving XML format documents from Word.

Then you have to write XSLT to convert your XML document to Word's format. Unless the document's you're creating are failrly trivial, this becomes a nightmare really quickly.

 

[nJett]

that sucks but is kind of what I expected (why I asked before charging off on a tangent). I imagine I can replicate the entire layout using HTML/CSS though - it will no doubt be tedious and all but certainly more fun than wrestling with stupid non-standard MS crap. Probably be cooler to the management types too because I can create a "print on demand" version that is magically up to date for anyone to print out from a browser...

thanks!

 

[MrChad]

You can download the XSD files for the Office XML formats here.

You might find some more information here.