As of today we have three OOXML versions/flavours:

  • OOXML ECMA-376 1st Edition, 2006 (this is Word 2007) - as of today, Aspose.Words supports only this.

  • ISO/IEC 29500:2008 Transitional (Word 2010) - we have code ready for the upcoming release that will support this.

  • **ISO/IEC 29500:2008 Strict - **Aspose.Words will support this some time in the future.

The question I have to all of the customers of Aspose.Words is:

What is the best way to represent the different OOXML versions in the Aspose.Words API?

The general requirements I have:

  1. It should be easy to use and look natural and consistent.

  2. It should follow the accepted .NET framework coding guidelines.

The two scenarios we are currently considering are:

  • Add the OoxmlCompliance enum and add the SaveOptions.OoxmlCompliance property.
    -or-

  • Add new values to the SaveFormat enum.

I will quickly discuss both of the scenarios below and I am looking for your feedback and new ideas as well.

Scenario 1: Add the OoxmlCompliance enum and a new option to SaveOptions

Saving a document in the new ISO 29500 format will look like this:

// You need to set the option. The default will be ECMA-376 to preserve existing behaviour.

doc.SaveOptions.OoxmlCompliance = OoxmlCompliance.Iso29500_2008_Transitional;
doc.Save(@“C:\MyFile.docx”);

///
/// Allows to specify which OOXML specification will be used for the output DOCX file.
///
public enum OoxmlCompliance
{
///
/// ECMA-376 1st Edition, 2006.
///
Ecma376_2006,

/// <summary>  
/// ISO/IEC 29500:2008 Transitional compliance level.  
/// </summary>  
/// <remarks>  
/// ISO/IEC 29500:2008 specification is sometimes referred to as as ECMA-376 2nd Edition.  
/// </remarks>  
Iso29500_2008_Transitional

}

What I don’t like:

  1. It requires an extra line of code to select the OOXML version/flavour.

  2. The names of the enum values are quite ugly and don’t follow .NET guidelines, but I want the names to be informative. Tried other variants and did not like them.

Scenario 2: Add more values to the SaveFormat enum.

Saving a document in OOXML could look like this:

// This is for the new format.

doc.Save(@“C:\MyFile.docx”, SaveFormat.Docx_Iso29500_2008_Transitional);

// This is for the existing ECMA-376 format to keep the behavior unchanged.

doc.Save(@“C:\MyFile.docx”, SaveFormat.Docx);

// This is to maintain consistency (have all versions named explicitly)

doc.Save(@“C:\MyFile.docx”, SaveFormat.Docx_Ecma376_2006);

What I don’t like:

We have SaveFormat.Docx, SaveFormat.Docm, we probably should have SaveFormat.Dotx and SaveFormat.Dotm and if we want to add ISO29500 Transitional and Strict and also explicit name for ECMA-376 we could end up with 4 x 4 = 16 enum values like SaveFormat.Docm_Iso29500_2008_Transitional, SaveFormat.Docx_Iso29500_2008_Transitional etc. Too noisy.

Any ideas?