Word VBA: get location and or name of attached template when the original template it was based on, is no longer available

Hi Jay,

Thank you!

This was exactly the alternative route I thought about.

I find it only very hard to understand why it is that the info is in the document somewhere, and that I can't think of a way to get it with VBA ;-)

Astrid

Another way to approach this is to add this macro to the template's ThisDocument module:

Private Sub Document_New() 

    ActiveDocument.CustomDocumentProperties.Add _ 

        Name:="OriginalTemplate", LinkToContent:=False, _ 

        Value:=ThisDocument.FullName, Type:=msoPropertyTypeString 

End Sub 

This macro will run automatically each time a new document is created based on this template (and at no other time). That means that the property's value won't change when another template (which doesn't have code to overwrite this particular property) is attached.

There are a couple of ways to retrieve the custom property's value, regardless of whether the document has been attached to a different template.

• Insert the field { DOCPROPERTY OriginalTemplate } anywhere in the document and update it.
• Go to File > Info, click the Properties heading at the top right, and click Advanced Properties in the menu. In the Properties dialog that opens, go to the Custom tab and select OriginalTemplate in the Properties list. The full name of the original template will appear in the Value box (which can scroll sideways).

• In VBA, if you want the value for use in another macro, retrieve the value into a string variable with code like this:

    Dim OT As String 
  
    OT = ActiveDocument.CustomDocumentProperties("OriginalTemplate").Value
  

I see that the name of the template is stored in the docProps\app.xml part of the document

 <Properties xmlns:vt="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeDocument/2006/docPropsVTypes" xmlns="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeDocument/2006/extended-properties">

<Template>Test.dotm</Template>

You would think the path itself must be stored somewhere as well, since it is there in the document. If you set the document as read/only before you open the file in Word itself, the full path and filename of the attachedtemplate are visible in the interface.

Is it possible to retrieve the template property from xml when the document itself is opened?

Astrid

Hi John,

Thanks for your reply.

This sounded very promising. However it does not work.

As soon as I open the document, the template attaches to normal.

I tried the AttachedTemplate earlier, but as a property of the document itself:

ActiveDocument.AttachedTemplate.fullname

I thought defining an object variable to a template might be different. In both cases however, the result is normal.dotm instead of the original template.

Now that I think about it more, I realise this couldn't work at all. Since the path/filename is not available, you can't create a template object from it as well.

Astrid

This code will work on a document that hasn't yet been re-attached to the Normal template:

Set myTemplate = ActiveDocument.AttachedTemplate 

MsgBox myTemplate.Path & Application.PathSeparator & myTemplate.Name

Reference: Document.AttachedTemplate property (Word)