Overview

In the following steps, you create the Windows Form project.

1. Start Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 or Microsoft Visual Studio 2008.

2. On the File menu, click New Project.

3. In the New Project dialog box, in the Project types pane, expand the Visual Basic node, and in the Templates pane, click Windows Form Application.

4. Provide a name for the project and then click OK. This creates the Form1 class.

In the following steps, you create the form for the project as shown in Figure 1.

1. In the Solution Explorer, expand the Form1.vb node and then double-click the Form1.Designer.vb node.

2. On the Windows form designer, drag the following controls from the toolbox and then set the properties in the Properties pane as shown in Table 1. You can display the toolbox by pressing Ctrl + Alt + X and then display the Properties pane by pressing F4.

   Table 1. Add these controls to the Windows Form designer

   Control	Property	Value
   Form1	Text	Search and Replace
   Label1	Text	Search Directory
   TextBox1	Name	txtDirectory
   CheckBox1	Checked	True
   	Name	ckbIncludeSub
   	Text	Include Subfolders
   Label2	Text	Original Text
   TextBox2	Name	txtOldText
   Label3	Text	New Text
   TextBox3	Name	txtNewText
   Button1	Name	btnGetFiles
   	Text	Search and Replace
   Button2	Name	btnClose
   	Text	Close Form
   Label4	Text	Number of Changes Made
   TextBox4	Name	txtNumChanged

   The finished form should look like Figure 1.

   
   
   Figure 1. The Search and Replace form
   
   

In the following steps, you setup and add Visual Basic code to the project.

1. First, you need to add a reference for the DocumentFormat.OpenXml.Packaging library to the project. This DLL file contains the namespace and programming members that you use to work with the Open XML Format files.

   On the Project menu, click Show All Files.

2. In the Solution Explorer, right-click the References node and then click Add Reference.

3. In the Add Reference dialog box, on the .NET tab, select DocumentFormat.OpenXML, and then click OK.

4. On the Form1.vb Designer, double-click the btnGetFiles button to add the btnGetFiles_Click event procedure to the Form1 class.

5. Add the following code to the btnGetFiles_Click procedure.

   Visual Basic

   Dim rootdir As String = txtDirectory.Text
   numChanged = 0
   SearchFolders(rootdir)

   This event procedure is initiated when the user clicks the Search and Replace button. First, it assigns the starting directory to a variable and then calls the SearchFolders procedure.

6. Next, before the Public Class Form1 statement, add the following namespaces. Adding these namespaces here allows you to use the name for each member without having to fully qualify the member name. Note that the DocumentFormat.OpenXml.Packaging namespace contains the members used for working with the Open XML Format files.

   Visual Basic

   Imports System
   Imports System.IO
   Imports System.Text
   Imports System.Xml
   Imports System.Windows.Forms
   Imports DocumentFormat.OpenXml.Packaging

7. After the Public Class Form1 statement, add the following class fields.

   Visual Basic

   Private fileType() As String = {"*.docx", "*.docm"}
   Private numChanged As Integer
   Const wordmlNamespace As String = "http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/wordprocessingml/2006/main"

   Here, you specify the file extensions that you will search. Instead of hard-coding the file extensions, you could add these selections to a combo box in the form and let the user select which types of document to search. You also specify a constant containing the WordprocessingML namespace.

8. Next, add the SearchFolders procedure to the project. This procedure is responsible for searching the folders and subfolders, if requested by the user, for the document files.

   Visual Basic

   Private Sub SearchFolders(ByVal rootdir As String)
   Dim files() As String
   Dim file As String
   Dim subdir As String
       
   Try
      ' Search the files in the given directory.
      For i As Integer = 0 To fileType.Length - 1
         files = Directory.GetFiles(rootdir, fileType(i))
         For Each file In files
             Search_Replace(file)
         Next
      Next
      ' Also recursively search subfolders if requested.
      If ckbIncludeSub.Checked Then
         For Each subdir In Directory.GetDirectories(txtDirectory.Text)
            SearchFolders(subdir)
         Next
      End If
       
   Catch
      ' Ignore any errors.
   End Try
   End Sub

   This procedure uses the GetFiles method of the Directory object to get the list of files from the root directory. The loop first looks for .docx files and the second pass looks for .docm files as specified in the fileType() array which you assigned in the class field declarations. Then, for each file found, the Search_Replace procedure is called.

   Next, if the user selected the Search Subfolders checkbox (it is selected by default) in the form, the GetDirectories method of the Directory object is called with the root path, which then retrieves and assigns a subfolder path, if they exist, to the subdir string variable. That path is recursively passed to the SearchFolders procedure which reinitiates the search process. Note that in this particular structure, only subfolders one level below the root directory are searched. With a little research, you could modify the structure to search lower level subfolders.

9. Now add the Search_Replace procedure to the project. This procedure is where you search the Open XML Format files for the text terms.

   Visual Basic

   Private Sub Search_Replace(ByVal file As String)
   Dim wdDoc As WordprocessingDocument = WordprocessingDocument.Open(file, True)
       
   ' Manage namespaces to perform Xml XPath queries.
   Dim nt As NameTable = New NameTable
   Dim nsManager As XmlNamespaceManager = New XmlNamespaceManager(nt)
   nsManager.AddNamespace("w", wordmlNamespace)
       
   ' Get the document part from the package.
   Dim xdoc As XmlDocument = New XmlDocument(nt)
   ' Load the XML in the part into an XmlDocument instance.
   xdoc.Load(wdDoc.MainDocumentPart.GetStream)
       
   ' Get the text nodes in the document.
   Dim nodes As XmlNodeList = Nothing
   nodes = xdoc.SelectNodes("//w:t", nsManager)
   Dim node As XmlNode
   Dim nodeText As String = ""
       
   ' Make the swap.
   Dim oldText As String = txtOldText.Text
   Dim newText As String = txtNewText.Text
   For Each node In nodes
      nodeText = node.FirstChild.InnerText
      If (InStr(nodeText, oldText) > 0) Then
         nodeText = nodeText.Replace(oldText, newText)
         ' Increment the occurrences counter.
         numChanged += 1
      End If
   Next
       
   ' Write the changes back to the document.
   xdoc.Save(wdDoc.MainDocumentPart.GetStream(FileMode.Create))
       
   ' Display the number of change occurrences.
   txtNumChanged.Text = numChanged
   End Sub

   First, the file name is passed into the procedure. Then, the file is opened as a Open XML Format WordprocessingML document with read and write access. Next, the namespace alias used in the document is assigned to a namespace table. This namespace alias is used with the XPath query to find the text nodes in the document.

   Then, an instance of an XML document is created and the contents of the main document part in the Open XML Format file is loaded into the XML document. The structure of the XML in the main document part of a very simple document is as follows.

   Xml

   <w:document>
      <w:body>
         <w:p>
            <w:r>
               <w:t> </w:t>
            <w:r>
         </w:p>
      </w:body>
   </document>

   Where
   w:p – Denotes a paragraph.
   w:r – Denotes a run of text nodes.
   w:t – Contains the text.

   Thus, the following XPath expression selects all of the text nodes in the main document part.

   Visual Basic

   nodes = xdoc.SelectNodes("//w:t", nsManager)

   The next section in the procedure loops through each of the text nodes and searches for an occurrence the original term by using the InStr function. If the term is found, it is swapped with the new term.

   Visual Basic

   For Each node In nodes
      nodeText = node.FirstChild.InnerText
      If (InStr(nodeText, oldText) > 0) Then
         nodeText = nodeText.Replace(oldText, newText)
         node.FirstChild.InnerText = nodeText

   Next, a counter for the number of change occurrences is incremented. Once all of the nodes have been searched, the updated XML is saved back to the main document part. And finally, the txtNumChanged.Text textbox is set to the number of changes affected.

   As you can see, this process is fairly straight-forward and made simple by using the methods of the DocumentFormat.OpenXml.Packaging namespace.

10. And finally, add the following procedure to the project. This event procedure is called when the user click the Close Form button.

    Visual Basic

    Private Sub btnClose_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles btnClose.Click
       Close()
    End Sub

Before testing the project, you need to create some test documents in Word 2007 containing the term you want to search for. Also remember to add some documents in a subfolder below the root directory.

For my test, I created several documents containing the Gettysburg address and swapped the terms Four score with the term Eighty. As an aside, a score is equal to twenty-years so four score is equal to eighty years.

1. On the Debug menu, click Start Debugging.

2. In the Search and Replace form, type in the path containing the files and subfolders.

3. Type the term to search for and the term you want to swap it with.

4. Click Search and Replace.

   If everything goes well, you see the number of changes displayed in the Number of Documents Updated text box (see Figure 2).

5. Click Close Form.

   
   
   Figure 2. The form displays the results of the search and replace process
   
   

As you saw in this article, using the members in the DocumentFormat.OpenXml.Packaging namespace makes working with Open XML Format files relatively simple. I encourage you to add other features to the project such as letting the user specify the document types to search, searching for subfolders more than one level below the root directory, or providing the ability to search and replace Excel 2007 files.

• Introducing the Office (2007) Open XML File Formats
  
  
• Manipulating Word 2007 Files with the Open XML Object Model (Part 1 of 3)
  
  
• Manipulating Word 2007 Files with the Open XML Object Model (Part 2 of 3)
  
  
• Manipulating Word 2007 Files with the Open XML Object Model (Part 3 of 3)
  
  
• Manipulating Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007 Files with the Open XML Object Model (Part 1 of 2)
  
  
• Manipulating Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007 Files with the Open XML Object Model (Part 2 of 2)