Char(10) in MS Word 2007 Doc from Template

Question

Does text formatting such as char(10) work with MS Word 2007 Doc from Template? I have a text with several line breaks and it works fine in Appian but the output of the document has everything in one line.

ManuelHTG · Accepted Answer

char(10) does not work in Word, it will remove the new line. If you want to keep it, you need to replace char(10) with "" (similarly on html you would do with
)

Mike Schmitt · Answer

No. Word only cares about the XML code in the underlying XML file; you can actually insert char(10) characters in the text you insert into the document, and if you open document.xml in a text editor you will see them - but Word disregards these while rendering the document for display as they aren't XML.

Mike Schmitt · Answer

Except if you just insert "" directly into the text, you won't see a linebreak in Word, you'll see "" (though the < or > characters might cause Word to throw an error when opening the document). The reason for this is that it would still be inside the ... tags, meaning Word tries to interpret it literally as text. The solution I've found for this is to insert , then , then a new . I prefer to do this via a predefined expression rule instead of ad-hoc, to take the guesswork out of it. Here's mine, i.e. GLBL_insertWordDocxLineBreak() ... a!localVariables( local!rows: if( rule!GLBL_isBlank(ri!num), 1, if(ri!num < 1, 0, ri!num) ), "" & concat(repeat(local!rows, "" & char(10))) & "" ) Note this rule allows adding multiple linebreaks if/when necessary via passing in a value for ri!num .

Mike Schmitt · Answer

Further, all text that could ever contain the characters "<", ">", or "&", needs to be sanitized before passing into the Word template. So basically anything that's ever user-editable, and/or from a not stirctly-controlled source of text. Here's my rule GLBL_sanitizeTextForWordDocx() , note that this rule calls the linebreak rule from my above comment, so it takes care of invalid characters and linebreaks (converted from char(10)s) at the same time. reduce( fn!substitute, trim(ri!text), merge( { "&", ">", "<", char(10), char(13) }, { tohtml("&"), tohtml(">"), tohtml("<"), rule!GLBL_insertWordDocxLineBreak(num: 1), "" } ) )

sitwatn0001 · Answer

Try this: { "" & "" & "" & "Line 1"& "" &"" & "" & "Line 2"& ""& ""& "" }

Char(10) in MS Word 2007 Doc from Template

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