Date Field not being updated with current date

Aspose.Words Product Family
1

I'm am using Aspose.Words ver 3.6.1.0 and Aspose.PDF 3.1.1.0. My word documents have a date field that is set to update automatically, however, when I merge data using Aspose.Words and export to PDF, the date field does not get updated to the current date that the document is generated. I entered the date field two different ways. First by going to Insert - Date Field (checked update automatically). And the second way was Insert - Field - Date. In both cases the field code is mask as { DATE \@ "MMMM/dd/yyyy" }. I have attached the word document and the pdf document for your reference.

Thanks,

ryan

2

Aspose.Words does not update Date fields automatically. You need to update these fields in MS Word to have the actual data. I will check if it can be done by some coding with the current Aspose.Words API and let you know.

Best regards,

3

Thanks for the quick response.

if Aspose.Words currently does not update the Date field automatically, is there a code around that I might be able to implement?

Thanks

4

Here is an example of how DATE field updates can be done with the current API:

private void UpdateDates(Document doc)

{

NodeCollection fieldStarts = doc.GetChildNodes(NodeType.FieldStart, true);

ArrayList dateFieldSeparators = new ArrayList();

ArrayList dates = new ArrayList();

ArrayList nodesForRemoval = new ArrayList();

foreach (FieldStart fieldStart in fieldStarts)

{

if (fieldStart.FieldType == FieldType.FieldDate)

{

Node node = fieldStart;

string fieldCode = "";

while (node.NodeType != NodeType.FieldSeparator)

{

if (node.NodeType == NodeType.Run)

{

fieldCode += ((Run)node).GetText();

}

node = node.NextSibling;

}

dateFieldSeparators.Add(node);

node = node.NextSibling;

Match match = Regex.Match(fieldCode, @".*?\\@\s*""(?.*?)""");

string dateFormat = match.Groups["dateformat"].Value;

string date = DateTime.Now.ToString(dateFormat, CultureInfo.CurrentCulture);

dates.Add(date);

while (node.NodeType != NodeType.FieldEnd)

{

nodesForRemoval.Add(node);

node = node.NextSibling;

}

}

}

for (int i = 0; i < dateFieldSeparators.Count; i++)

{

Node node = ((Node)dateFieldSeparatorsIdea [I]);

node.ParentNode.InsertAfter(new Run(doc, (string)datesIdea [I]), node);

}

foreach (Node node in nodesForRemoval)

{

node.Remove();

}

}

In this example we look through all fields, search for DATE fields among them, parse the field code with the regular expression to get formatting strings like M/d/yyyy. Then we take current system date/time, format it using parsed format string from the field code and CultureInfo of the current thread. The resulting string is inserted as a new field value. Nodes that were previously in the field value are removed.

Field code is composed of the text from nodes that are between FieldStart and FiledSeparator nodes in a document. Field value consists of the nodes that are between FieldSeparator and FieldEnd.

You can use DocumentExplorer demo to get a visualized view of how the document is represented by Aspose.Words node tree. It will help you to understand better how documen nodes can be used and manipulated.

Best regards,

5

Aspose Team,

Thanks, I'll put it to use.

6

Legend - thanks for this post - exactly what I needed.

We had a similiar problem - a document had some dates in it that were designed to be updated on print. Doing a merge to Word worked fine, but when we tried to print a document or merge to PDF - the date wouldn't get updated.

This code works like a dream and does the job (and gives a bit of insight how todo other field types as well!)