Daily Archives: September 20, 2011

Undocumented behavior of Office 2010 Word Save As dialog with Sharepoint

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Here’s another Office 2010 undocumented “feature”.

First a little background regarding required fields in sharepoint:
In Office 2007, in order to attach the Sharepoint properties to a document you had to first Save it into the document library. Word would allow you to save, but the document would remain checked-out to you until you filled in the necessary required properties, and checked it in.

If you were developing a system that automated adding documents to SharePoint, you could not even present the Document Information Panel to the user until the document was already in SharePoint. If the user decided to cancel… you had hanging files.

With Office 2010, Word (and I imagine other apps) will not actually complete the Save operation to a SharePoint Document Library when there are required fields. You get a warning and the document is _not_ placed in SharePoint, but the Fields from the Document Library are attached to your Word document.

In Word, if you want to display the “Save As” dialog box pre-populated to a SharePoint library you do something like this:

dynamic dlg = Application.Dialogs[Word.WdWordDialog.wdDialogFileSaveAs];
dlg.Name = "http://sharepointserver/doclib/filename.docx";
dlg.Show();

This will act the same as the normal “Save As” dialog.

If you want to handle the save process yourself, instead of dlg.Show(), use dlg.Display. This *should* take no action regardless if the user presses Ok or Cancel. If the destination happens to be SharePoint – intsead of doing nothing like it is supposed to – Word happily retreives the Sharepoint properties and attaches them to your document.

In addition to being handy, Word will attach the document properties to Read-Only and Protected files – which is something you cannot do using CustomXMLParts.
And it’s a heck of a lot easier than trying to build and attach them yourself.

While it is undocumented (and therefore subject to change), it is kind of impossible to work around — Word WILL attach the sharepoint properties, so you might as well take advantage of it.

UPDATE 3/20/2012: Unfortunately, I have discovered that this method is unreliable. On one of our user’s machines, the Save As dialog refuses to display the sharepoint folder at all. I don’t know why, but I wouldn’t recommend relying on this.

Viewing and editing Sharepoint properties on a Word document… again

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I have posted before about a method of editing the SharePoint Document properties on a Word document in Office 2010 (and Office 2007). I just found something that completely blew my mind. I spent hours and hours battling with CustomXMLParts, Protected and Readonly documents, and a Save-As dialog… and found out that all that effort was pretty much wasted.

Behold:
_Document.ContentTypeProperties Property
Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.Document.ContentTypeProperties

ContentTypeProperties is a collection of MetaProperty objects representing (possibly among other things) the SharePoint properties displayed in the server document properties panel. And you can edit them.

So instead of a mess of XML xpath, namespaces, exception handling and “_x0020_”‘s , if you want to edit a sharepoint list column called “Task Id”, you would do the following:

doc.ContentTypeProperties["Task Id"].Value = "task1";

(Yes, you still might need some exception handling…)

The CustomXMLParts will be updated appropriately, and when you save it to sharepoint, the properties will be populated.

Have a look at the members of the MetaProperty object:
.Name = sharepoint internal column name: “Task Id”
.Id = escaped column name: “Task_x0020_Id”
The other properties are what you would expect.

Please note that this will only work if the word document has been “touched” by SharePoint. See my next post for a quick (and undocumented) method of getting those properties attached in Word 2010.