LiveDocx in PHP

Lucas Mbiwe, over at the LiveDocx Blog, has just published a blog post that illustrates how to generate templates in OpenOffice.org (OOo). If you wish to create templates in OOo, please read this text:

• Creating templates using OpenOffice.org

His tutorial is relevant to OOo 2.4, 3.0 and 3.1.

I would like to draw special attention to the last paragraph of his text.

Although the merge field names in the above template appear to be:

• LiveDocx.letter.recipient
• LiveDocx.letter.sender

i.e. with a period as path separator, they are in fact:

• LiveDocxÿletterÿrecipient
• LiveDocxÿletterÿsender

i.e. with the character  ÿ  as path separator.

When assigning data to the template, you must use the notation with  ÿ  and not a period. For example:

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$mailMerge = new Zend_Service_LiveDocx_MailMerge();
 
$mailMerge->setUsername('myUsername')
          ->setPassword('myPassword');
 
$mailMerge->setLocalTemplate('template.docx');
 
$mailMerge->assign('LiveDocxÿletterÿrecipient', 'Sam Johnson')
          ->assign('LiveDocxÿletterÿsender', 'Peter James');
 
$mailMerge->createDocument();
 
$document = $mailMerge->retrieveDocument('pdf');
 
file_put_contents('document.pdf', $document);

The method getFieldNames() correctly returns the field names with  ÿ  as path separator.