Creating Personalized Documents with a Mashup of

Technologies…and some other nifty stuff

James JohnsonFounder and President, Inland Empire .NET User’s

GroupMicrosoft MVP

e: james@iedotnetug.org t:@latringowww.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 Telerik RadEditor 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

Telerik RadEditor

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

Demo

“OpenXML is 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?

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