MS Word / Tamino WebDAV integration

Has anyone tried to store Word documents into Tamino, whereby the metadata of the Word document are extracted and stored (as properties) together with the document as non-xml document.

At the moment I’m exploring the possibility to store (and retrieve with DASL) Word documents into Tamino using a macro and it would be of great help if someone has done something similar (and with DASL functionality on top to make it even more attractive ;-).

Kind regards,
Rudolf

Hi Rudolf,

I am itrigued. I thought that MS Word documents were stored in a proprietary binary format. How would you extract the metadata?

Parhaps having a look at the OpenOffice source could help?

Kind regards,

Simon

Hi Simon,

Actually there’s nothing mysterious about it. Using a simple macro you can extract the meta data from any Word document. The user must of course maintain this part (via properties).

Then you can store the document in binary format and decorate it with these custom properties (you need a macro to accomplish this) using PROPPATCH.

I have made a start doing exactly this, but I wondered if someone else has done the same thing (otherwise I need to do this anyway).

Kind regards,
Rudolf

Hi Rudolf,

is there a possibility within VBA to issue WebDAV commands?

Regards,
Martin

Hi Martin,

Yes you can and it is real simple. Attached you will find a simple VB6 example which I have used to play a bit with our first Tamino WebDAV implementation (and I invite those who are interested to do the same).

Here you can see how to explore the collections, properties, locking/unlocking of documents and related to this locking the use of an opaque token (which is required in order to lock a document).

The only thing you need is XMLHTTP (or ServerXMLHTTP, but watch out ServerXMLHTTP won’t work on Windows client machines) and a WebDAV reference (that’s how I did it).

BTW XMLHTTP is part of msxml4.dll (i.e. version 4 but you can also use previous versions).

Kind regards,
Rudolf
Tamino_WebDAV_Client.zip (33.1 KB)