Associating Data with Content Controls

re: Associating Data with Content Controls

DavidThi808 — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 18:22:35 GMT

You cannot use the Tag property if your fragment is over 64 characters. For some reason there is a 64 character limit on the Tag property.

re: Associating Data with Content Controls

Robert — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 09:06:21 GMT

Can't you put all your custom attributes in an XML-fragment which you serialize in the Tag-property? I assume the standard tag-value DOES get copied?

re: Associating Data with Content Controls

Alasdair Cunningham-Smith — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 18:56:11 GMT

We have been talking to Peter Amstein about this. We independently figured this method out and implemented it, but it's good to have the approach confirmed.

Where it goes wrong is copy & paste. The user can copy & paste a (run containing a) content control. Unfortunately, we can't find any way to "hook" the paste event. The pasted content control gets a new ID which doesn't reference any node in our custom XML part, so when we later find one disconnected like this we can clearly identify what's happened to it, but equally we can't identify which was the source "copied" content control. As in our application those extra attributes were really important, this breaks the copy & paste semantics and therefore the user experience.

Any suggestions would be most welcome.

re: Associating Data with Content Controls

GrayKnowlton — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 21:14:49 GMT

Interesting,

Great to hear that you are finding success on the content control side.

Regarding the nested controls, I am able to make this work without any trouble using two text controls or rich text controls. What control types are you adding? What Office product & version are you using?

re: Associating Data with Content Controls

kwaazaar@hotmail.com — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 20:06:17 GMT

Excellent! This is exactly the guidance I was looking for!

I had two problems with content controls, one being not able to specifying multiple properties/attributes for them. This post describes in detail that is IS possible and how to do it.

My other problem with content controls is the way they are presented by Word (frame with a 'handle'): when I add a content control around a tablerow AND also add a content control around the first tablecell, I am no longer able to select the one around the table cell, because Word only lets me select the one around the table. Maybe you can give me a tip on how to work around this?