Working with Content Controls

What Are Content Controls?

Content controls are bounded and potentially labeled regions in a document that serve as containers for specific types of content. Individual content controls can contain content such as dates, lists, or paragraphs of formatted text. In some cases, content controls might remind you of forms. However, they are much more powerful, flexible, and useful because they enable you to create rich, structured blocks of content. Content controls also build on the custom XML support introduced in Microsoft Office Word 2003. Content controls enable you to author templates that insert well-defined blocks into your documents. Content controls enable you to:

• Specify structured regions in a template. Each structured region has its own unique ID so that you can read from and write to it. Examples of types of structured regions (or content controls) are combo boxes, pictures, text blocks, and calendars.
• Determine the behavior of content controls. Each content control takes up a portion of a document and, as the template author, you can specify what each region does. For example, if you want a region of your template to be a calendar, you insert a calendar content control in that area of the document, which automatically determines what that block of content does. Similarly, if you want a section of a template to display an image, create a picture content control in that area. In this way, you can build a template with predefined block types.
• Restrict the content of content controls. Each content control can be restricted, so that it cannot be deleted or edited. This is useful if, for example, you have copyright information in a template that the user should be able to read but not edit. You can also lock a template's content so that a user does not accidentally delete portions of it. This makes templates more robust than in previous versions.
• Map the contents of a content control to data in a custom XML part that is stored with the document. For example, if you insert a document parts content control that contains a table of stock prices, you can map the table cells to nodes in an XML file that contain the current stock prices. When the prices change, an add-in can programmatically update the attached XML file, which is bound to each cell, and the new, updated prices automatically appear in the table.

The easiest way to create a content control is through the user interface (although you can also create them programmatically). To create a content control through the user interface (UI), select the text that you want to turn into a content control and then choose the content control type you want from the content controls section of the Developer ribbon. This creates a content control around the selected text.

What's New in the Object Model?

There are four new objects and collections that allow you to programmatically work with content controls. The following table describes each. For more information about each, see the individual topic for the object or collection.

Each of these objects or collections has methods and properties that allow you to work with the content controls both individually and as a collection. Because there are various types of content controls (see the following section "Types of Content Controls"), the ContentControl object has members that might not apply to all the different types of content controls. The following table shows some of the properties of the ContentControl object and the different types of content controls they apply to.

Types of Content Controls

There are seven different types of content controls that you can add to a document, each of which is represented in a new enumeration called WdContentControlType.

Changes to Existing Objects

In addition to new objects, there are also several new methods and properties for existing objects. For example, the ContentControls properties allow you to access collections of content controls within a document, range, and selection. In addition, you will find several new events that allow you to run code when adding or removing a content control or when a user edits a content control. The following list describes each of the events and when the event code runs. All of these events are members of the Document object.

Working with the Code

Whether you want to add a content control, delete a content control, or access and manipulate existing content controls, you can do it with code. The following sections are just a few samples of what you can do.

Adding a Content Control

As mentioned previously, there are seven different types of content controls that you can add to your documents. Use the Add method of the ContentControls collection to add a content control to a document. The following example adds a date picker to the active document and sets the date value to the current date.

  Sub AddDatePicker()
Dim objCC As ContentControl
Dim objDate As Date

Set objCC = ActiveDocument.ContentControls _
    .Add(wdContentControlDate)
objDate = Date
objCC.Range.Text = objDate

End Sub

You can use the same basic construction to add any of the different types of content controls to a document.

Adding a Title to a Content Control

Use the Title property to add a title to a content control. This is text that users see, and it can help them to know what type of data to enter into the content control. The following example adds a new plain-text content control to the active document and sets the title, or display text, for the control.

  Sub SetTitleForContentControl()
Dim objCC As ContentControl

Set objCC = ActiveDocument.ContentControls _
    .Add(wdContentControlText)
    
objCC.Title = "Please enter your name"

End Sub

Modifying Placeholder Text to a Content Control

Placeholder text is temporary text. It can be a simple one-word or two-word description (similar to the title) or it can be a more thorough description (such as numbered steps). Modifying the placeholder text is the same regardless of the type of content control or the expected contents of the content control. The following example adds a drop-down list to the active document, sets the placeholder text for the control, and then fills the list with the names of several animals.

  Sub SetPlaceholderText()
Dim objCC As ContentControl

Set objCC = Selection.ContentControls _
    .Add(wdContentControlComboBox)
objCC.Title = "Favorite Animal"
objCC.SetPlaceholderText _
    Text:="Please select your favorite animal "

'List entries
objCC.DropdownListEntries.Add "Cat"
objCC.DropdownListEntries.Add "Dog"
objCC.DropdownListEntries.Add "Horse"
objCC.DropdownListEntries.Add "Monkey"
objCC.DropdownListEntries.Add "Snake"
objCC.DropdownListEntries.Add "Other"

End Sub

These are just a few of the ways that you can use the object model to manipulate content controls in your documents. For more examples, see the How To section.