How to: Get the titles of all the slides in a presentation (Open XML SDK)

In the Open XML SDK, the PresentationDocument class represents a presentation document package. To work with a presentation document, first create an instance of the PresentationDocument class, and then work with that instance. To create the class instance from the document call the PresentationDocument.Open(String, Boolean) method that uses a file path, and a Boolean value as the second parameter to specify whether a document is editable. To open a document for read-only, specify the value false for this parameter as shown in the following using statement. In this code, the presentationFile parameter is a string that represents the path for the file from which you want to open the document.

The using statement provides a recommended alternative to the typical .Open, .Save, .Close sequence. It ensures that the Dispose method (internal method used by the Open XML SDK to clean up resources) is automatically called when the closing brace is reached. The block that follows the using statement establishes a scope for the object that is created or named in the using statement, in this case presentationDocument.

The basic document structure of a PresentationML document consists of the main part that contains the presentation definition. The following text from the ISO/IEC 29500 specification introduces the overall form of a PresentationML package.

This following XML code segment represents a presentation that contains two slides denoted by the Id’s 267 and 256.

<p:presentation xmlns:p="…" … > 
   <p:sldMasterIdLst>
      <p:sldMasterId
         xmlns:rel="http://…/relationships" rel:id="rId1"/>
   </p:sldMasterIdLst>
   <p:notesMasterIdLst>
      <p:notesMasterId
         xmlns:rel="http://…/relationships" rel:id="rId4"/>
   </p:notesMasterIdLst>
   <p:handoutMasterIdLst>
      <p:handoutMasterId
         xmlns:rel="http://…/relationships" rel:id="rId5"/>
   </p:handoutMasterIdLst>
   <p:sldIdLst>
      <p:sldId id="267"
         xmlns:rel="http://…/relationships" rel:id="rId2"/>
      <p:sldId id="256"
         xmlns:rel="http://…/relationships" rel:id="rId3"/>
   </p:sldIdLst>
       <p:sldSz cx="9144000" cy="6858000"/>
   <p:notesSz cx="6858000" cy="9144000"/>
</p:presentation>

Using the Open XML SDK 2.5, you can create document structure and content using strongly-typed classes that correspond to PresentationML elements. You can find these classes in the DocumentFormat.OpenXml.Presentation namespace. The following table lists the class names of the classes that correspond to the sld, sldLayout, sldMaster, and notesMaster elements:

The sample code consists of two overloads of the method GetSlideTitles. In the first overloaded method, the presentation file is opened in the using statement. Then it passes the PresentationDocument object to the second overloaded GetSlideTitles method, which returns a list that represents the titles of all the slides in the presentation.

The second overloaded GetSlideTitles method is used to get a list of slide titles. It takes the PresentationDocument object passed in, iterates through its slides, and gets the slide IDs of all the slides in the presentation. For each slide ID, it gets a slide part to pass to the GetSlideTitle method. It returns to the first GetSlideTitles method a list of strings that it assembles from the titles, each of which represents a slide title.

The method GetSlideTitle is used to get the title of each slide. It takes the slide part passed in and returns to the second overloaded GetSlideTitles method a string that represents the title of the slide.

The Boolean method IsTitleShape is called from within the method GetSlideTitle to determine whether the shape is a title shape. It takes the slide part passed in and returns true if the shape is a title shape; otherwise, it returns false.

The following is the complete sample code that you can use to get the titles of the slides in a presentation file. For example you can use the following foreach statement in your program to return all the titles in the presentation file, "Myppt9.pptx."

The result would be a list of the strings that represent the titles in the presentation, each on a separate line.

Following is the complete sample code in both C# and Visual Basic.

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