Read document without content control?

  • 17 April 2017
  • 4 replies
  • 7 views

Badge +8

Greetings:

I have read a number of posts concerning the Read Document workflow action and how to use it.  For my use case, however, I will have a number of documents in a library that do not have content controls.  I will want to read the entire document into a variable (just  few paragraphs of text).  Is there no way to do this without using content controls?

Thanks,

Bruce


4 replies

Userlevel 3
Badge +9

Based on this post Is it possible to combine multiple Word documents into one using Nintex Workflow?, there is not a way to do this with the current out of the box actions, unless you are using O365, where you could use the Document Generation functionality.  Chris Ben may be able to provide and update on when this functionality would be coming to SP2013/2016.  

This post talks about reading a CSV File using a web request.  You could see if this would also work for a document. Nintex Workflow - Parse CSV and Create a List - Vadim Tabakman  

Userlevel 6
Badge +12

Hi all,

Bruce - can you provide more context about why you want to read the contents of a word doc?  What are you going to do with the content?

As Brendan mentioned, you can use the Doc Gen action to combine multiple documents together so if the document you want to read is self contained and you want to merge it with something else, then doc gen is a good way to go.  It is available for 2013/2016 right now.  Please note you may require a license upgrade to access doc gen functionality.

Cheers,

Chris

Badge +8

Hi Chris:

Yes, I am trying to merge several smallish Word documents into a single document, based on a template.  The source documents shouldn't need content controls but the template does so I can place the correct content in the appropriate location. That's what I'm looking for.

DocGen is not an option as we are still using Nintex 2010.  :-(

Bruce

Userlevel 6
Badge +12

Hi Bruce,

You're right - Doc Gen isn't available for 2010.  Looks like content controls might have to be the way forward for you unless you want to store the text in a list item instead of a document?

Cheers,

Chris

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