The DOCX Publish Trigger: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and get on Word Open XML
Rahul Bhagnari, Project Analyst, Hannon Hill
DOCX is the new extension for Microsoft Word 2007/8. It allows users to access the specific doc files anywhere as it also works as an open XML format. Therefore, these documents can be opened through applications like Google Docs. The DOCX format is highly useful, transferable, and provides alternatives to PDF versions of a page. This saves time and energy (and because Cascade and PDF don’t get along).
This presentation will cover a general overview of the DOCX file format and how to apply the publish trigger within Cascade. Basic end users, or non-technical users, will view pages as a separate file extension under a special configuration. This is the Word Open XML configuration.
Technical users should be able to view the configuration. When viewing it in the system, it looks extremely similar to the standard XML configuration except with DOCX tags surrounding the content. For example, instead of <p>content</p> it would read as <w:p>content</w:p>. This makes it really easy to customize the DOCX format. The format created is an XSLT stylesheet. This pulls the content as entered through the data definition and metadata sets and transforms it into the Word Open XML format.
Next, the publish trigger has to be created. That is, when pages are published out, the corresponding DOCX file is also published to the server. For example, if a content page is located as www.hannonhill.com/index.html, the corresponding DOCX file would be at the path: www.hannonhill.com/index.docx. Finally, add a specially created (exclusive to HH only) DOCX folder that is placed on the server-side directory. Finally, create a destination for the publish trigger and your Word Open XML or DOCX configuration is complete.