Is it possible to consume a webservice from within Word (2000 or XP)
in order to perform a mail merge?

The problem is: we are moving our Access database online, but we
don't want to lose the mail merge functionality.
I guess this is a common scenario, but I couldn't find any references
through Google.

--

Jos

Hi Jos,

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No. Word requires a file stored in a local or network path. No http
paths; no web-services.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jan 24 2003)
http://www.mvps.org/word

This reply is posted in the Newsgroup; please post any follow question
or reply in the newsgroup and not by e-mail :-)

Cindy,

That was a negative approach, the answer is 'yes with a
catch'.

Jos,

Cindy is correct that you will need to have a file or
ODBC source to reference. You can simply create an temp
file that is a CSV.

Option #1.

Create the temp csv and use Office Automation of Word to
perform your mailmerge. Remember to clean up the temp
file.

Option #2.

On your web server, create verbs for the .csv extension
and have your Word document use http:\\mydata.csv for the
datasource. The mydata.csv is actually an ASP page that
response.writes the data in CSV format. You could make
this a wrapper page that accepts paramaters for different
queries. The wrapper page then consumes the webservice
get the appropriate results.

HTH,


Matthew Holton




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