There are a couple of common use cases for docx4j’s XHTML import capability:<\/p>\n
The first is enabling a webapp with HTML reporting <\/strong>to output\/export reports in Word’s docx format. \u00a0With docx4j, you can get really nice results doing this, especially if your XHTML has @class which map to Word styles.<\/span><\/p>\n The second – to support web based editing<\/strong> – is the subject of this post. \u00a0In a full incarnation, the vision is:<\/span><\/p>\n docx4j can help you with this vision in a Java or .NET (eg C#) environment.<\/p>\n Web based XHTML editing is well understood, so here I’ll focus on tracking chunks of content.<\/p>\n In XHTML, its straightforward. \u00a0You can add div elements (eg <div id=”contentXYZ”>) to your heart’s content. \u00a0And you can nest them (think book, chapter, section, sub-section).<\/p>\n How to track that ID to or from docx format?<\/p>\n The answer: content controls.<\/p>\n Bookmarks are another possibility, but I wouldn’t recommend them for this purpose, because it is easy for a user to delete them, or inadvertently insert extra bookmarks. \u00a0They lack the rich features of content controls (eg locking), and aren’t very “XMLy” (they are pairs of start and end point tags which create additional challenges).<\/p>\n So, back to content controls.<\/p>\n Content controls are analogous to divs. \u00a0They have IDs; you can nest them; etc.<\/p>\n Content controls aside, the docx file format is flat. \u00a0Its a sequence of paragraphs and tables. \u00a0Its only inside tables that paragraphs also appear (and nested tables).<\/p>\n So, all we need to do convert divs to content controls, and vice versa.<\/p>\n This post tells you how to do that with docx4j.<\/p>\n XHTML to docx (div to content control)<\/strong><\/p>\n For XHTML to docx, you use docx4j-ImportXHTML<\/p>\n div to content control support was added after 3.2.0’s release, in this commit<\/a>. \u00a0So for now, you need to build from source, or use a nightly build<\/a>.<\/p>\n Once you have that, to use it, do something like:<\/span><\/p>\n XHTMLImporterImpl XHTMLImporter = new XHTMLImporterImpl(wordMLPackage); That implementation will convert div elements to content controls, and place @id and @class values into the content control’s w:tag<\/a>, for example “class=class1&id=myid”<\/p>\n You can extend DivToSdt with any extra functionality\/logic you might require, such as locking<\/a> the content control for editing\/deletion<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n
\nXHTMLImporter.setDivHandler(new DivToSdt());<\/strong><\/p>\n