{"id":2949,"date":"2016-03-19T07:31:08","date_gmt":"2016-03-19T07:31:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ericwhite.com\/home2\/bm8qcmjy\/public_html\/blog\/?page_id=2949"},"modified":"2016-03-19T07:33:09","modified_gmt":"2016-03-19T07:33:09","slug":"generating-open-xml-documents-using-t4-text-templates","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.ericwhite.com\/blog\/generating-open-xml-documents-using-t4-text-templates\/","title":{"rendered":"Generating Open XML Documents using T4 Text Templates"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This is a fun project that I’ve been meaning to do for some time – and I finally found the time in the last week.  T4 Text Templates are a very cool technology in Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 that make it super-easy to generate C# code, XML, or other text in an automated fashion as part of the editing experience in Visual Studio.  The way they work is that you write a text template that consists of a mixture of text and code.  The text can be C# code, XML, HTML, or just about any kind of text that you can imagine.  The code can be C# or VB.NET – the code is embedded in special code blocks that are delimited by <# and #>.  Then, when you save the template in Visual Studio, at that point in time, right as you save it, Visual Studio transforms the template into a complete program, compiles it, runs it, and then saves the output in a file in your project.<\/p>\n

This is a natural technology to apply to Open XML document generation. In this video, I create a text template from some LINQ to XML code, and a word-processing document that I saved in the Flat OPC format<\/a>.  When you save the template, it generates automatically a word-processing document from the template.  You can open the word-processing document immediately after saving the template.<\/p>\n

While it is great to edit and develop T4 templates in Visual Studio 2010, you may want to generate a document in a different context – perhaps as part of a larger process.  You can write your own T4 template processor by writing a ‘Custom Host’.  The video walks through this process and demonstrates generating a word-processing document from a command line program.  Note that before you can build a Custom Host, you need to install the Visual Studio 2010 SDK<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I kept the actual document that I generate as simple as possible, as I was more concerned about demonstrating the mechanics of using T4 templates to generate Open XML documents.  You can take these basic ideas that I present in this video, and generate some really complicated documents with a minimum of effort.<\/p>\n

I’ve attached the code to this post.<\/p>\n