About ModulAcht
ModulAcht is a software development team that creates individual software for small businesses. Mostly we develop web applications including web UI and web-services. But we are also familiar with Windows Forms and Windows Services applications based on .NET. Our mission is to design your everyday work so that you are no longer slowed down by cumbersome processes. Together with you & your colleagues, we will find ways and solutions that make work fun.
Problem
For our main customers, we were required to develop the operating system they shall use to administer the buying and selling of cars. With a need to generate documents easily, one of the main requirements was to have an easy-to-use template system.
Solution
DOCX is a well-known file format that can be read and modified by many editors. Therefore, we decided to use DOCX as the import format, where content-controls can be used as placeholders.
The template engine can then be used to fill the placeholder with appropriate content and save the resulting file as a DOCX document. In a second step, the DOCX template will be converted into PDF format. After getting the template engine ready to use, it turned out that the conversion would be the main challenge. One of the components we had tested was Aspose.Words for .NET from Aspose which unlike some others did its job as expected.
Image 1:- The Template file preview
Image 2:- Placeholder replaced
Image 3:- Resultant PDF
Experience
Finding a solution
We searched on the internet for DOCX to PDF converters, which is not as easy as it sounds. After filtering all the Interop wrappers, only a handful of components remained to be tested. In the end, only Aspose.Words for .NET generated the results that really resembled the input DOCX. The really quick and competent support of Aspose helped us to solve some initial problems.
Implementation
Aspose.Words for .NET was the 4th component we tested. On our development machine, everything worked great, but after moving the code on to our test-server-machine, the resultant PDF did not look like the original DOCX file. Adjusting the settings didn’t help so we decided to give the support team of Aspose a try. After a short discussion in the live chat, we started a new thread including a description, the input, and the output file in the Aspose.Words forum. Within less than 24 hours, one of the support-team members told us that we would have to check whether the font we used in the DOCX file was available on the server machine, which it was not. After changing the font, the whole PDF looks exactly the same as the DOCX file.
Outcome
Choosing Aspose.Words for .NET meant an intuitive and easy to use software component and also getting a really friendly and straightforward software partner which is ready to help if you need help.
Next Steps
After getting our Test-Driver ready, we will implement the template engine in our customer’s software. Aspose.Words for .NET functionality will be used in many different places in this software to convert files into PDF format.
Summary
A software that is doing its job, a friendly and competent support team, and an obliging salesman… Testing any other component means to waste time!