Working with Comments

13 Jul 20263 minutes to read

A comment is a note or annotation that an author or reviewer can add to a document. DocIO represents a comment with a WComment instance.

NOTE

The comment start and end ranges and dates can be preserved only on processing an existing document that already contains this information for each comment.

Adding a Comment

You can add a new comment to the Word document by using appendComment method of WParagraph class.

The following code shows how to add a new comment to the document:

JAVA

//Creates a new Word document.
WordDocument document = new WordDocument();
//Adds a section and a paragraph in the document.
document.ensureMinimal();
IWParagraph paragraph = document.getLastParagraph();
//Appends text to the paragraph.
paragraph.appendText("AdventureWorks Cycles, the fictitious company on which the AdventureWorks sample databases are based, is a large, multinational manufacturing company.");
//Adds comment to a paragraph.
WComment comment = paragraph.appendComment("comment test");
//Specifies the author of the comment.
comment.getFormat().setUser("Peter");
//Specifies the initial of the author.
comment.getFormat().setUserInitials("St");
//Sets the date and time for the comment.
comment.getFormat().setDateTime(LocalDateTime.now());
//Saves the Word document.
document.save("Comment.docx", FormatType.Docx);
//Closes the document.
document.close();

Modifying a Comment

The following code illustrates how to modify the text of an existing comment in the Word document:

JAVA

//Opens the template document.
WordDocument document = new WordDocument("Comment.docx", FormatType.Docx);
//Iterates the comments in the Word document.
for (Object comments : document.getComments())
{
	WComment comment = (WComment)comments;
	//Modifies the last paragraph text of an existing comment when it is added by "Peter".
	if ((comment.getFormat().getUser()).equals("Peter"))
		comment.getTextBody().getLastParagraph().setText("Modified Comment Content");
}
//Saves the Word document.
document.save("ModifiedComment.docx", FormatType.Docx);
//Closes the document.
document.close();

Removing Comments

You can either remove all the comments or a particular comment from the Word document.

The following code shows how to remove all the comments in Word document.

JAVA

//Opens the template document.
WordDocument document = new WordDocument("Comment.docx", FormatType.Docx);
//Removes all the comments in a Word document.
document.getComments().clear();
//Saves the Word document.
document.save("Result.docx", FormatType.Docx);
//Closes the document.
document.close();

The following code shows how to remove a particular comment from Word document.

JAVA

//Opens the template document.
WordDocument document = new WordDocument("Comments.docx", FormatType.Docx);
//Removes the second comment from a document.
document.getComments().removeAt(1);
//Saves the Word document.
document.save("Result.docx", FormatType.Docx);
//Closes the document.
document.close();

Accessing parent comment

You can access the parent comment of a particular comment (reply) in a Word document using the getAncestor() API. The ancestor for a parent comment returns null by default.

The following code example shows how to access the parent comment of a particular comment in a Word document.

JAVA

//Creates an empty WordDocument instance.
WordDocument document = new WordDocument();
//Opens an existing Word document using the Open method of the WordDocument class.
document.open("Comments.docx");
//Gets the ancestor comment.
WComment ancestorComment = document.getComments().get(1).getAncestor();
//Saves and closes the Word document.
document.save("Result.docx", FormatType.Docx);
document.close();