Word Interop Disable Overwriting While Saving

Question

I am trying to export some text from RichTextBox to a word application. I got things figured out for the most part, but I cannot figure how to disable the overwrite feature if the filename is the same. I found a couple of posts where they wanted to enable the overwrite while saving without prompting the user, but trying the opposite of those solution didn't resolve :( I would like to code in such a way so that the Word would prompt users if there already is a file with a given filename.

The code snippet is below

 private void BtnExportToWord_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        string fileName = "abc123";
        FolderBrowserDialog folderBrowser = new FolderBrowserDialog();
        folderBrowser.ShowDialog();
        string folderLocation = folderBrowser.SelectedPath;
        string fileNameWithPath = string.Format("{0}\\{1}", folderLocation, fileName );
        string rtf = fileNameWithPath + ".rtf";
        string doc = fileNameWithPath + ".doc";

        richTextBox1.SaveFile(rtf);
        var wordApp = new Word.Application();

        /* none of these modes help
        wordApp.DisplayAlerts = Word.WdAlertLevel.wdAlertsAll;
        wordApp.DisplayAlerts = Word.WdAlertLevel.wdAlertsMessageBox; */

        var document = wordApp.Documents.Open(rtf);
        document.SaveAs(doc, Word.WdSaveFormat.wdFormatDocument);
        document.Close();
        wordApp.Quit();
        File.Delete(rtf); 
    }

What is it that I am missing here?

ps. Similar post: disabling overwrite existing file prompt in Microsoft office interop FileSaveAs method The answer there shows that DisplayAlert is a bool, but my VS Intellisense shows it takes an enum of type WdAlertLevel. How come my doesn't prompt by default? Different Versions?

Grant Winney · Accepted Answer · 2014-09-30T01:55:43.683

1

Use a SaveFileDialog() to prompt where they'd like to save the "doc" file. If the "doc" file already exists, just keep prompting them.

string docFilePath;

using (var sfd = new SaveFileDialog())
{
    sfd.InitialDirectory =
        Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.MyDocuments);
    sfd.FileName = fileName + ".doc";

    while (true)
    {
        sfd.ShowDialog();

        if (!File.Exists(sfd.FileName))
        {
            docFilePath = sfd.FileName;
            break;
        }
    }
}

Once you've got the path where'd they'd like to save the "doc" file, just strip the file path out, save your "rtf" file, then the "doc" file, and delete the "rtf" file.

var rtfFilePath = Path.Combine(
    Path.GetFullPath(docFilePath), Path.GetFileNameWithoutExtension(docFilePath), ".rtf");

I'm guessing at some of the settings here, like for InitialDirectory. You'll have to play around with it to get it just how you want.

edited Sep 30 '14 at 01:55

answered Sep 29 '14 at 23:34

Grant Winney

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Thanks. This works, but not exactly what I am looking for. Since I am deleting the rtf file after converting it to Word doc, it won't be recognized as a duplicate on the next round. Any other approach you could think of? I am thinking I might need something on the Word Interop side. – haku Sep 30 '14 at 01:16
No, nothing DB related operations involved. The thing is that I am only deleting the file with rtf extension, but before I delete that rtf file, I make a Word version with the same name .doc extension, and this word version isn't deleted. So on the next round, even if I use SaveFileDialogue, there won't be any duplicate file, but now when I convert the rtf and save a new Word doc, it overwrites the earlier word document because of the same filename. That is what I am trying to prevent. – haku Sep 30 '14 at 01:36
Thanks for the follow up! I will give it a try and see if that helps my situation. – haku Sep 30 '14 at 01:59
I just added a File.Exists check for file with .doc extension before I started the conversion to Word. @GrantWinney Thanks for the idea, it helped! Appreciated. – haku Sep 30 '14 at 14:15

Word Interop Disable Overwriting While Saving

1 Answers1