VSTO Word Add-In : Content Control Nesting

Question

I'm building an MS-Word Add-In for the company where I'm doing my internship.

I already created a new ribbon with lots of SplitButtons and Buttons. Now what i want to do is when you click one of the buttons a content control will ba added to the word doc. This works fine for Plain Content Controls. These content controls have tags like "sport/basketball/player/name" which is binded to an element in an XML file.

private void addSimpleContentControl(String tag, String placeholder)
{
    try
    {
        contentControlPlain = Globals.ThisAddIn.Application.ActiveDocument.ContentControls.Add(Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.WdContentControlType.wdContentControlText);
        contentControlPlain.Tag = tag;
        contentControlPlain.SetPlaceholderText(null, null, placeholder);
    }
    catch (COMException) { }    
}

Now let's talk about my problem. Some of my elements could be present for more then one time. So what i want to create is a Rich Content control which holds more than one Plain content control.

So i have a SplitButton "player" with buttons like "name","jersey number","position",..... When one of the underlying buttons is clicked i first check if a rich text control with a specific name already exist. If not than i make one and add one single Plain content control to it.

Rich content control-> plain text control -> end of Rich content control

So far so good, this all goes fine but from the moment i want to add another plain content control to the rich content control this pops up :

"Plain text controls cannot be inserted around other controls or XML elements"

here is my code to add a plain content control to a rich content control.

private void addContentControlToRich(String tag, String placeholder,String title) 
{
    Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.Document doc = Globals.ThisAddIn.Application.ActiveDocument;

    foreach (Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.ContentControl cc in doc.ContentControls)
    {
        if (cc.Title == title && cc.Type == Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.WdContentControlType.wdContentControlRichText)
        {
            try
            {
                Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.Range rng = cc.Range;
                object oRng = rng;
                contentControlPlain = doc.ContentControls.Add(Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.WdContentControlType.wdContentControlText, ref oRng);
                contentControlPlain.Tag = tag;
                contentControlPlain.SetPlaceholderText(null, null, placeholder);
                contentControlPlain.LockContentControl = true;

                break;
            }
            catch (COMException) { }
        }
    }
}

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 03 '13 at 20:09

instead of

contentControlPlain = doc.ContentControls.Add(Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.WdContentControlType.wdContentControlText, ref oRng);

use

contentControlPlain = richTextControl.Range.ContentControls.Add(Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.WdContentControlType.wdContentControlText, ref oRng);

before using above code use code below

Application.Selection.Start = lastControlinRichTextControl.Range.End+1;

and set `oRng = Application.Selection.Range

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 18 '12 at 00:32

As per the message, your code is trying to wrap a plain text control around everything in the rich text control (ie an existing plain text control). Fix your range object so that it doesn't do that eg collapse it to just a point inside the rich text control.

VSTO Word Add-In : Content Control Nesting

2 Answers2