Performing Mail Merge with RadWordsProcessing

RadWordsProcessing is evolving faster and faster. One of the latest features we have implemented is mail merge. For those of you who are not familiar with this functionality, Wikipedia says: “Mail merge is software operation describing the production of multiple and potentially large numbers of documents from a single template and a structured data source."

In this post, I will demonstrate with simple examples how easy it is to create a document template and the ease with which the data source is passed to the same template to perform the merging.

Creating a Mail-Merge Document Template with Code

Before executing mail merge, we need first to have a document template to merge our data with. The mail-merge document template is just a document containing a special type of elements called merge fields. A merge field is simply a reference to a data field by the field’s name.

Fields are inserted with RadFlowDocumentEditor. To learn more about RadFlowDocumentEditor, check the Say Hello to RadWordsProcessing blog post.

Let’s start creating the template by initializing a new document and associating it with an editor.

As a next step, insert the first couple of fields.
To insert a field using InsertField method of RadFlowDocumentEditor you will need the code fragment of the field and the field result. The code fragment is composed from the field name and parameter. In our case, MERGEFIELD is the field name and LastName is the parameter that represents property in the data source record. The field result represents the content that should be shown in the document template.

And here is the result saved in DOCX format:

Of course, the template doesn’t need to be created with RadWordsProcessing. It could be created in one of the formats supported by the library that also supports mail-merge functionality like DOCX or RTF and imported with the respective format provider.

Creating Data Source and Passing it to the Mail-Merge Document Template

Once we have a template, it’s time to prepare for the data source merging. The only requirement to the data source is to implement the IEnumerable interface. This way, the document template will be able to iterate over all records and produce the final merged document. The records in the source need to contain properties corresponding to all the merge field names. Here is the class definition of the mail-merge record for our example:

Creating separate classes each time you want to use the mail-merge functionality is not mandatory; dynamic class could do the job, as well.

Finally, we need to pass the data source to the document template. This is done with a single line of code:

And that’s all! The mail merge is finished. The following image illustrates the final result of our example with one record:

The used code is available for download in our SDK repository on GitHub.
Feel free to contact us if you have any questions or suggestions for the WordsProcessing library.