How to merge comments from multiple word documents

HOW TO MERGE COMMENTS FROM MULTIPLE WORD DOCUMENTS HOW TO
HOW TO MERGE COMMENTS FROM MULTIPLE WORD DOCUMENTS CODE

One caveat about the code вЂ“ it does not handle comments that are inserted into a math formula. It also discusses the code that merges comments. The following screen-cast demonstrates the PowerTools for Open XML cmdlet that merges comments from multiple documents into a single document. The algorithm was far easier to code and debug than the first version of comment merging that I wrote, so I am even more convinced that this approach of splitting runs up, processing, and then subsequently merging runs is a good one. It then can вЂwalkвЂ™ down the list of runs of both source paragraphs, identifying common characters, identifying comment markup, and creating a new paragraph that contains comments from both source documents (unless the comments happen to be identical, in which case only a single copy of the comment is placed in the merged document).

Once the algorithm identifies a paragraph that contains comments that need to be merged from the two documents into a single document, it breaks up the runs (in both source documents) into runs of a single character each. I decided that I like this approach to doing intricate manipulations of text content in WordprocessingML documents, so I used this approach to merge comments from two identical (except for comments) WordprocessingML documents into a single document. I did some experiments where I watched the working set (amount of memory allocated) while I processed a number of documents using this approach, and memory usage stabilized at a reasonably small amount (at least using the test documents I had, a few of which were artificially large). It does create a fair number of extra short-lived objects on the heap however, the. That algorithm was easy to code and debug.

The transform also makes sure that those вЂcharactersвЂ™ are also each in their own run. This approach also plays nicely with those вЂcharactersвЂ™ that are represented by special markup, such as tab characters, break characters, soft hyphen characters, and the like (see the children elements of the w:r element for a complete list). It then becomes a trivial exercise to find a sequence of runs (each of a single character) that match the sequence of characters in the search string. In that code, after identifying a paragraph that contained the search string, the algorithm then splits all runs in the paragraph up into runs each of a single character. It was hard to debug and get all of the edge cases right.ДЇlash forward 3 years вЂ“ I recently wrote some code to do search-and-replace of text in a WordprocessingML document. This approach turned out to be problematic, and far more complicated than it needed to be. In that original version of the sample code, I attempted to write code that determined where breaks were needed in runs, and then split runs as appropriate. I took this as a challenge, and a couple of months later, I released some sample code to do merge comments. Those developers had attempted to write code to do this, and were not successful.

HOW TO MERGE COMMENTS FROM MULTIPLE WORD DOCUMENTS HOW TO

Several years ago, I was at a Microsoft conference, and was asked by a couple of attendees how to merge comments from multiple Open XML WordprocessingML documents into a single document. Merge Comments from Multiple OpenXML WordprocessingML Documents into a Single Document

How to merge comments from multiple word documents