Hi, I have a asp.net web app. On click of a button on a web page,I want to create a new MS word document on the client machine and show some data fetched from the server in it. Client can make changes into that document and save it on it's machine. After that client can again upload the saved document in the server and we need to update the data on the server based on changes done by client. Here, the constraint is, Office suite is only installed on client machine. so we have to extract the data from word document only at client machine and send it to server in any form like xml. Also I am thinking to use content controls in word document. What are the possible ways to meet above requirement??? In a quick way I found that probably it is possible through silverlight 4 but that is in beta version. can I do it by Active x using c#?? Any other approach would also be highly appreciable.
This is definitely one of those times when I would just say... "no." Getting anything to work in the way you describe would be difficult at best. Would definitely require custom ActiveX in order to work at all. But there are so many problems with the basic idea, I'd be surprised if this ever worked very well. It would basically be one hack on top of another.
It sounds like ultimately what you want to do is share an MS Word document. Isn't this what Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server is for?
This is not a free solution, but Aspose.Words has an object model for manipulating Word documents on the server side without Microsoft Office installed. Creating them on the server using Aspose would be easy. The uploading back and extracting content is also possible. Rather than trying to extract XML on the client side you could just have them upload the whole document back and use the Aspose object model to open it up and grab the relevant sections.
I have no commercial interest in Aspose -- just a happy customer.