[Mark McGinty]

env: Word 2003+

Greets,

I'm trying to do something that, on the surface, seemed pretty basic: I need
to serve-up a Word mail-merge document (as XML) over HTTP, that is already
linked to data that is also served over HTTP.

The closest I have gotten is to link .csv data by setting the attributes
(defined using XPath) w:wordDocument/w:docPr/w:mailMerge/w:query@w:val
and w:wordDocument/w:docPr/w:mailMerge/w:dataSource@w:val to a URL.
(w:query@w:val must be prefixed with "SELECT * FROM"; oddly, both must be
set.)

This actually does work, except that it prompts annoyingly, 2 to 3 times.
The first time I could accept (the prompt references the URL) but the
"extra" prompts make the functionality look dumb (they apparently reference
some locally cached alias -- from a user standpoint, it looks really lame.)

To summarize, we want to provide a Word mail merge all pre-prepared, no user
intervention required, as a feature of a web site. We don't want to expose
any SQL Servers to the public Internet (for obvious reasons) and we
absolutely do NOT want to use Jet (not explicitly, anyway.) Our current
solution (which had to support Word 2000) involves use of Office automation
objects and the scripting file system object -- difficult to support to say
the least.

At one point it looked to me like there was a way to embed the merge data
inside the [xml] document itself, though I can't find a way to make that
happen via Word's UI. (Otoh, I couldn't get Word to persist a URL-based
data source via UI either, and that nominally works, soooo...)

Any suggestions appreciated.


-Mark McGinty