ASP.NET Word Mail Merge

Question

I need to create a process of merging letters and/or envelope templates from a web app. We are using VS2010, C# (.net 4.0), asp.net, and Office 2007. The user selects a bunch of accounts from a list, and I need to collect the info for those accounts for merge. One catch is that if I look up an account and one of the two account holders has passed away, I need to change the greeting based on that info. For example, in most cases the letter would say something like Mr. and Mrs. Bob Smith. But if bob is dead, then it would just say Mrs. Mary Smith.

I also need it to open on the client side in word ready to print. So if the letter is 1 page, and the user selects 100 accounts, the word doc should have the letter merged with the 100 accounts just waiting for print. What is the best way to do this?

Answer 1

Silverlight might be a good candidate for this as it allows you to read local files and do soemthing with its contents, it also has a printing api.

However where do you want to do the printing on the client or the server?

Answer 2

As an overview you would need to use wcf services around your templates and then suse silverlight to actually create the documents and print them on the client.