In today's web applications, quite often you run into the need to create a Word document that user can download. The two most common ways of accomplish this is to install a copy of Word with Office Interop on the server or use a third-party library. Both of these options have significant downsides; however, there is a far simpler way to create Word Documents using XML. Because Word natively has the ability to read/write Word documents in XML, you can utilize all of the XML/XSLT tools in .NET to create them.
The first step is to create a normal Word document to be used as a template. Figure 1 shows a simple Word doc with which you will start to produce a report for Sales Territories from the Adventure Works sample database.
Figure 1: Word Document Template
Although this document does not make much sense at this point, you will use the markers in the document to help build the XSLT. To save this document to an XML file, you will need to save the file in the Word 2003 XML Document format shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Save as Word XML
Creating the XSLT
Now that you have an XML file, you can start the process of creating an XSLT (EXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformation). First, change the extension of the file from XML to XSLT. Then, open the XSLT in an XML editing tool. Next, you need to add a couple of tags at the top and bottom so that you can call this a XSLT. At this point, the top of the XSLT document should show the following couple of tags:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<w:wordDocument xmlns:aml=
"http://schemas.microsoft.com/aml/2001/core" ...
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