Word 2007 Content Placeholders and the Word 2003 plugin for Office 2007

It's to Microsofts credit that they have provided a plugin for Word 2003 that will allow the reading of a Word 2007 .docx file. And it (mostly) works. If however you need to use some of the new features office 2007 - such as the content placeholders you'll find that the content inside them won't render. I'm hoping they'll fix this soon.

If you haven't checked out content placeholders you can file many articles on it, but here is a reasonable overview on content placeholders in Office 2007. It's a great new feature, but as usual not without it's limitations, such as handling repeating sub groups, and the definate need of a configuration editor that others outside the Office team have had to write.

InfoPath 2007, SQL05 and ZQuery

As part of the latest project we're looking at an uber Sharepoint 2007 solution. One area we are looking at are storing completed forms data directly to SQL05, and what querying we can do directly.
So, to try this out I created a table with 2 columns as below.

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[tblInfoPathForms]([FormGuid]
[uniqueidentifier] NOT NULL CONSTRAINT [DF_tblInfoPathForms_FormGuid] DEFAULT
(newid()),[FormData] [xml] NOT NULL,CONSTRAINT [PK_tblInfoPathForms] PRIMARY KEY
CLUSTERED ( [FormGuid] ASC )WITH (IGNORE_DUP_KEY = OFF) ON
[PRIMARY]) ON [PRIMARY]

FormGuid is obvious, the second column however uses the new datatype in SQL05 - the xml datatype

How is this different to storing the xml in a text column? Glad you asked. The XML datatype has the following advantages. It's stored as a binary stream, so access is quicker. It also supports the XQuery language directly through SQL statements, allowing you to find node data and manipulate it directly.

So - Having created a test infopath form, published it and completed it. I have my XML. Infopath XML is not too bad really. Inserting the XML is just like any other insert statement.

XQuery can use either XPath structure or the more complex FLWDR syntax - which acts more like SQL. The query below uses $s as an alias for the Xpath root /statusReport and returns the text inside the reportDate node.

SELECT FormData.query('for $s in
/statusReportreturn $s/reportDate/text()')
FROM tblInfoPathForms
WHERE
FormGuid='FE66CE45-891E-453D-8225-E5504D26608B'

Easy! Well....not quite - if you run this query you will get an empty cell back. Microsoft disregards the XQuery specification here and does not return an error message, instead returning an empty result. So what is the problem? Namespaces. Looking at the original XML

xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xmlns:my="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/infopath/2003/myXSD/2005-09-22T20:42:56"
xmlns:xd="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/infopath/2003"
xml:lang="en-us">

we can see that the namespace "my" is used throughout the document. By adding a default namespace for the document in the query prolog we get the correct results

SELECT FormData.query('declare default element namespace
"http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/infopath/2003/myXSD/2005-09-22T20:42:56";
for
$s in /statusReport
return $s/reportDate/text()')
FROM
tblInfoPathForms
WHERE FormGuid='FE66CE45-891E-453D-8225-E5504D26608B'

Now that we can get at the expected result it's just a case of playing about with the query to get other results. XQuery is quite powerful and allows count and sum operations, along with methods to "shred" the XML back into result sets.

Regex - The Website Accessibility Saviour

While trying to make Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS) based websites I've had to employ several funky tricks, including Http Modules, overriding page rendering, inherited pages/master pages and the work horse of the entire system - the regular expression
Most of making CMS accessible has been catching the resulting html before it gets to the user, finding x and replacing it with y. This works for a lot of things (eg, removing the Border=0 attribute that microsoft insist on adding to any image). The situation with links was quite different. I needed to find and remove target="_blank" where found, but also add in onclick javascript to launch the page in a new window. Why should I want to do this? Target is not a valid attribute in either the HTML or XHTML strict specification and we needed to open some websites in another window as they had some dodgy bad practice that stopped you using the back button in your browser.
So...the goal was to get from:

http://www.mysite.com" target="_blank">
to

http://www.mysite.com" onclick='window.open("http://www.mysite.com");return false;'>
The key is System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex, and more specifically the Replace method.

Regex.Replace(string sOrig, string sRegex, MatchEvaluator oMatchEvaluator, RegexOptions Options)

example below:

m_sXHTML = Regex.Replace(m_sXHTML,
"<[aA]\\s([^>]*href=\"([^>^\"]+)\"[^>]*target=[\"]?_blank[\"]?[^>]*)>",
new MatchEvaluator(ConvertTargetToJavascript), RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);

The two keys are the regular expression and the Match evaluator delegate. I'll tackle the expression first.

"<[aA]\\s([^>]*href=\"([^>^\"]+)\"[^>]*target=[\"]?_blank[\"]?[^>]*)>"

Looks fun eh? There is a well defined syntax for regular expressions, which I don't intend to go into detail on here, but I will cover how this one works, breaking it down into chunks.

"<[aA]\\s([^>]*href=\"([^>^\"]+)\"[^>]*target=[\"]?_blank[\"]?[^>]*)>
match the character "a" or "A"

"<[aA]\\s([^>]*href=\"([^>^\"]+)\"[^>]*target=[\"]?_blank[\"]?[^>]*)>"
followed by a white space character ("\s" is the regex syntax, as this is in code we need to escape the escape character!)

"<[aA]\\s([^>]*href=\"([^>^\"]+)\"[^>]*target=[\"]?_blank[\"]?[^>]*)>"
Anything but a ">" -for zero or more occurances (*).

"<[aA]\\s([^>]*href=\"([^>^\"]+)\"[^>]*target=[\"]?_blank[\"]?[^>]*)>"
anything but ">" or double quote for 1 or more occurances (+)

"<[aA]\\s([^>]*href=\"([^>^\"]+)\"[^>]*target=[\"]?_blank[\"]?[^>]*)>"
(0 or 1) double quote (?)

This gives us a match for any tag that contains the target="_blank" or target=_blank attribute after the href attribute. If we do a similar regex for when it occurs before the href then we have covered all bases.

What I have not mentioned so far are the brackets throughout the regex. These imply groups of information that can be used by our match evaluator.

"<[aA]\\s([^>]*href=\"([^>^\"]+)\"[^>]*target=[\"]?_blank[\"]?[^>]*)>"
The value of the href attribute

"<[aA]\\s([^>]*href=\"([^>^\"]+)\"[^>]*target=[\"]?_blank[\"]?[^>]*)>"
all the attribute information for this tag.

All we need now is to provide the delegate method, in the example called "ConvertTargetToJavascript"

private string ConvertTargetToJavascript(Match m)
{
string sTest = m.Groups[0].ToString();
string sResult = "

";
return sResult ;
}

Group 0 is always the whole match. The groups that follow it depend on the round brackets used in the regex. In the example Group 1 will be all attribute information, and Group 2 will be the value of the href. The string result returned by the match evaluator will replace the original match.
All to easy.....once you get your head around regex syntax.