Working with Comments

11 Jun 20213 minutes to read

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

NOTE

The comment start and end ranges and dates can be preserved only on processing an existing document that already contains these 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");
//Set the date and time for 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 second comments 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 getAncestor() API. The ancestor for parent comment returns null as default.

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

JAVA

//Create an empty WordDocument instance.
WordDocument document = new WordDocument();
//open an existing Word document using the Open method of WordDocument class.
document.open("Comments.docx");
//Get the Ancestor comment.
WComment ancestorComment = document.getComments().get(1).getAncestor();
//Save and Close the Word document.
document.save("Result.docx", FormatType.Docx);
document.close();