How to: Get the Contents of a Document Part from an Office Open XML Package by Using the Open XML API

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The Office Open XML Package specification defines a set of XML files that contain the content and define the relationships for all of the document parts stored in a single package. These packages combine the parts that comprise the document files for Microsoft® Office Excel® 2007, Microsoft Office PowerPoint® 2007, and Microsoft Office Word 2007. The Open XML Application Programming Interface (API) allows you to create packages and manipulate the files that comprise the packages. This topic walks through the code and steps to retrieve the contents of a document part in an Office Open XML package in Office Word 2007, although the steps are the same for each of the three 2007 Microsoft Office system programs that support the Office Open XML Format.

Note
The code samples in this topic are in Microsoft Visual Basic® .NET and Microsoft Visual C#®. You can use them in an add-in created in Microsoft Visual Studio® 2008. For more information about how to create an add-in in Visual Studio 2008, see Getting Started with the Open XML Format SDK 1.0.

Retrieving the Contents of a Document Part from an Office Open XML Package

In the following code, you retrieve the contents of a WordprocessingCommentsPart part contained in a WordProcessing document package:

' How to get the contents of a document part.
Public Function GetCommentsFromDocument(ByVal document As String) As String
    Dim comments As String = Nothing
    Dim wordDoc As WordprocessingDocument = WordprocessingDocument.Open(document, true)
    Dim mainPart As MainDocumentPart = wordDoc.MainDocumentPart
    Dim WordprocessingCommentsPart As WordprocessingCommentsPart = mainPart.WordprocessingCommentsPart
    Dim streamReader As StreamReader = New StreamReader(WordprocessingCommentsPart.GetStream)
    comments = streamReader.ReadToEnd
    Return comments
End Function

// How to get the contents of a document part.
public static string GetCommentsFromDocument(string document)
{
    string comments = null;

    using (WordprocessingDocument wordDoc = WordprocessingDocument.Open(document, true))
    {
        MainDocumentPart mainPart = wordDoc.MainDocumentPart;
        WordprocessingCommentsPart WordprocessingCommentsPart = mainPart.WordprocessingCommentsPart;

        using (StreamReader streamReader = new StreamReader(WordprocessingCommentsPart.GetStream()))
        {
            comments = streamReader.ReadToEnd();
        }
    }
    return comments;
}

To retrieve the contents of a WordprocessingCommentsPart contained in a WordProcessing document package

1. First, pass in parameters representing the path to and the name of the Word 2007 source file.

2. Then, open the document as a WordprocessingDocument object.

3. Next, you create a reference to the WordprocessingCommentsPart part of the document.

4. Finally, you use a StreamReader object to read the contents of the WordprocessingCommentsPart part of the document and return the contents.