What's New in TX Text Control .NET for Windows Forms 14.0

Version 14.0 is where several parts of today's TX Text Control .NET for Windows Forms began: document sections with their own Page Setup dialog box, the DOCX format, MS Word fields as ApplicationField objects and the MailMerge class. It also appended documents to each other, described the pages of a document and ran on 64-bit systems.

Version 14.0 was released in January 2008 for the server and the client products, as the press release Press Release: TX Text Control 14.0 is Released announced.

Version 14.0 at a Glance

Platform

TX Text Control is available as a 64-bit edition. All kernel and filter DLLs support 64-bit memory addresses and have the same file names in both editions, and the class library is platform independent. 32-bit and 64-bit Applications describes the platforms of the current version.

Sections and Headers and Footers

• Sections. A document can be divided into sections, each with its own page size, page margins and headers and footers. TextControl.Sections returns a SectionCollection, whose sections are numbered from 1. The Format of a Section is a SectionFormat with BreakKind, Landscape, PageMargins and PageSize.
• Page Setup dialog box. TextControl.SectionFormatDialog opens the new Page Setup dialog box, in which users set the attributes and the headers and footers of one section or of the whole document. The SectionChanged and PageChanged events occur when the input position moves to another section or page.
• Status bar. The StatusBar shows the section at the input position and the numbers of pages and sections of the document. Properties such as ShowSection, ShowSectionCounter and ShowPageCounter select what it shows.
• Headers and footers per section. Each section has its own headers and footers, including a separate header and footer for its first page. Section.HeadersAndFooters returns them, and TextControl.HeadersAndFooters those of the whole document. A section that needs no header or footer of its own uses the one of the previous section when HeaderFooter.ConnectedToPrevious is true.

Sections and Page Layout and Headers and Footers describe them in the current version.

DOCX and Fields

• DOCX. TX Text Control loads and saves the WordprocessingML part of the Office Open XML format, the ZIP-compressed XML format of MS Word, in files with the extension .docx and in memory. The StreamType and BinaryStreamType value WordprocessingML selects it in TextControl.Load and TextControl.Save. See Supported File Formats.
• MS Word fields. Fields of MS Word and RTF documents are imported and exported as ApplicationField objects with the ApplicationFieldFormat MSWord. The class gives access to the TypeName and the Parameters of a field; it doesn't carry out the field's logic. TextControl.ApplicationFields lists all fields. Set LoadSettings.ApplicationFieldFormat to MSWord before loading, and select field types with LoadSettings.ApplicationFieldTypeNames. See Fields, Hyperlinks, and Bookmarks.
• Heiler HighEdit fields. Fields of Heiler HighEdit in RTF documents are imported and exported as application fields with the ApplicationFieldFormat value HighEdit, which gives their names.

Mail Merge

The DocumentServer.MailMerge class merges templates with data in .NET projects such as ASP.NET web applications, web services and Windows services. It uses a ServerTextControl, set with TextComponent, and fields of the type ApplicationField.

• Templates and results. LoadTemplate and LoadTemplateFromMemory load the template, and SaveDocument, SaveDocumentToMemory and Print output the merged documents in any StreamType format, as single documents or as one document.
• Merging. Merge merges the data, and MergeBlocks merges repeating blocks, which Version 20.0 made obsolete. RemoveEmptyFields, true by default, removes fields without data, and UseTemplateFormat, false by default, applies the page size and margins of the template.
• Events. DataRowMerged occurs for each merged data row and BlockRowMerged for each merged row of a block.

MailMerge introduces the class as it is today.

Documents and Pages

• Append documents. TextControl.Append loads a document from a file, a byte array or a string and appends it to the end of the current document, optionally as a new paragraph or a new section. ServerTextControl has the same method.
• Page coordinates. TextControl.GetPages returns a PageCollection. Because pages can have different sizes, each Page gives its Bounds and TextBounds, its first character and number of characters, its section and its NumberInSection. See Sections, Pages, Headers, and Footers.
• Formatting printer. TextControl.FormattingPrinter names the printer the document is formatted for, so that the displayed and the printed document have the same dimensions. The formatting device can also be the display.
• Background printing. An application can add its own PrintPageEventHandler to a PrintDocument to print images or watermarks on a page. The content of a TextControl or ServerTextControl is then printed transparently on top. See Printing and Print Preview.
• Page background. TextControl.BackgroundStyle defines how the page background is shown in page view.

Upgrade to Version 14.0

• HeaderFooterCollection.Style. The property was replaced with TextControl.HeaderFooterActivationStyle and TextControl.HeaderFooterFrameStyle, which set how a header or footer is activated and framed in the editor.

New Classes, Properties, Methods and Events

The classes and members below are the ones that the What's New documentation of version 14.0 lists for TX Text Control .NET for Windows Forms. Names are relative to the TXTextControl namespace, each name links to its current reference page, and "(obsolete)" marks a member that is obsolete today.

New Classes

• ApplicationField
• ApplicationFieldCollection
• DocumentServer.MailMerge
• DocumentServer.MailMerge.BlockRowMergedEventArgs
• DocumentServer.MailMerge.DataRowMergedEventArgs
• Page
• PageCollection
• Section
• SectionCollection
• SectionFormat

Members by Class

Next Steps

• Version 15.0: the features of the next version.
• Version 13.0: the vertical ruler bar, paragraph flow, hyperlinks in PDF and the field collections.
• Sections and Page Layout: divide documents into sections.