How to create automatically for every page footer in docx using C#

Question

I am creating a docx and I need a footer (for each page of a document) with timestamp and page (in this format: [present page] of [total pages].
Every post/code I've read online seems to indicate that I must create a footer manually for every page and write the page information manually: is it true? Is it not possible to write code in a way that, appended a footer to the main document, the docx automatically create itself every footer populating it with the right information?

Any advice?

Answer 1

From what I've seen in the documentation pages you need to add the footer to each page. This code project article has a decent code sample using OpenXML for Word. To get a understanding of footers see these docs.

A basic code sample

private static Footer GeneratePageFooterPart(string FooterText)  
{  
    var element =  
        new Footer(  
            new Paragraph(  
                new ParagraphProperties(  
                    new ParagraphStyleId() { Val = "Footer" }),  
                new Run(  
                    new Text(FooterText),  
                    // *** Adaptation: This will output the page number dynamically ***  
                    new SimpleField() { Instruction = "PAGE" })  
            ));  
  
    return element;  
}  

And if you are not currently working with OpenXML see my Microsoft article Office Word Basic operations: Open XML SDK 2.5 Office Word documents were there is a validator method to check if code written is valid markup for a word document..

Why use OpenXml? Performance, more control over generating files while the disadvantage is generally more code and not always the best documentation.