I built a template-based document generator using the Open XML SDK (1.0), the Word 2007 Content Control Toolkit and LINQ to SQL (using the CodeSmith PLINQO templates). To do this, I serialized the LINQ to SQL entities to XML by retrieving the entity using DataLoadOptions specified in the source code.

This works great, except that to initially populate the XML in my template, I currently have to copy and paste the XML from the Immediate window in VS2008 into the Content Control Toolkit, and it still has all the data from the current entity.

I'm looking for two solutions: 1) Is this a good way to build a document generator with Word 2007? 1) How can I generate just the XML I need without the data? I've thought of creating an XSD and then creating an empty XML document, but wasn't sure how to do that programatically so that a business user can get the XML for the template. (That's not a requirement, just a nice-to-have.)

Thanks for your feedback,

Ryan