Inspecting a Word mail merge data source programmatically
- by Guy Marom
I want to iterate over all rows of a MS-Word mail merge data source and extract the relevant data into an XML.
I'm currently using this code:
Imports Microsoft.Office.Interop
Do
objXW.WriteStartElement("Recipient")
Dim objDataFields As Word.MailMergeDataFields = DataSource.DataFields
For Each FieldIndex As Integer In mdictMergeFields.Keys
strValue = objDataFields.Item(FieldIndex).Value
If Not String.IsNullOrEmpty(strValue) Then
strName = mdictMergeFields(FieldIndex)
objXW.WriteElementString(strName, strValue)
End If
Next
objXW.WriteEndElement()
If DataSource.ActiveRecord = LastRecord Then
Exit Do
Else
DataSource.ActiveRecord = Word.WdMailMergeActiveRecord.wdNextDataSourceRecord
End If
Loop
And it turns out to be a little sluggish (About 1 second for each row). Is there any way to do it faster?
My fantasy is finding a function like MailMergeDataSource.ToDatatable and then inspecting the datatable.