Mail Merge Documents With Aspnet

Creating Personalized Documents with a Mashup of Technologies
…and some other nifty stuff
James Johnson
Founder and President, Inland Empire .NET User’s Group
Microsoft MVP
e: james@iedotnetug.org t:@latringo
www.duringlunch.com

Been around for a hundred bazillion years
Well actually since 2002
Build controls for
Web forms, MVC, Windows Forms
Silverlight, WPF
Testing Tools
A whole boatload of stuff
www.telerik.com
Telerik

Founder and President of the Inland Empire .NET User’s Group
Independent Consultant
Microsoft MVP
ADHD/ADD/OCD when it comes to new technology
Can’t stay away from the shiny new stuff.
About Me

Built custom system to generate large mail merge documents.
Needed way to integrate SQL Server, document editing, mail merge capabilities, and saving in Office 2007 format in an “access from anywhere” format.
Um… ok
Overview

SQL Server 2008 for data storage
Entity Framework for data access
ASP.NET MVC for “access anywhere”
jQuery for building client functionality
TelerikRadEditor for document editing
OpenXML SDK for creating Office 2007 format docs
Architecture

Ok, let’s see this wonderful thing
Demo

Can take some time to grok
Somewhat similar to LINQ to SQL
But different
Main gotcha
Need to check for and load relationships of the entity
if (!doc.MergeDocumentTypeReference.IsLoaded)
doc.MergeDocumentTypeReference.Load();doc.MergeDocumentType.DocumentTypeId
Entity Framework

So, yet something else to learn?
Demo

Easy – to modify interface
Lots of Ajaxy goodness
Able to access from anywhere with a well known technology
Fast development
Just ‘cause
ASP.NET MVC

A popular Rich Text Editor control for ASP.NET
Customizable, but with some pain
Formats text with CSS
Client side access to properties and methods
TelerikRadEditor

But I don’t want it to look like that!
I want it to look like this!
Demo

“OpenXMLis based on XML, which confers the benefits of preservation, interoperability, and extensibilty. It is designed to support the existing features of word-processing documents, presentations, and spreadsheets.”
www.openxml.biz
Format for generating Office 2007+ documents
Can use on a server
Easy, POCO functionality
OpenXML

There must be something wrong. It can’t be *this* easy.
Demo

Questions?

Win the Telerik controls suiteTweet #telerik#rmtechtrifecta

Mail Merge Documents With Aspnet

by James Johnson on Mar 05, 2010

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Mail Merge Documents With Aspnet — Presentation Transcript