How to use Office 2007 Automation in Windows 2008 service

I’ve lost approximately 3 days about this topic. I read tens of posts by finally I’ve understood…

I’m working on a solution including a file conversion from a document in MS Office 2003 format (doc, xls, ppt) to PDF.

To do this I’ve seen several products base on a windows service which utilize MS Office 2007 or Open Office capabilities to export your documents in PDF format.

I’m not very satisfy to accomplish the requirements with a product, so I started to investigate different examples to create my custom solution.

I started with the following projects hosted on “The Code Project” portal.

• Generate PDF Using C#

• Convert Word-Documents to PDF on an ASP.NET Server

While the first example is pretty easy to try (the only trouble is to find the correct version of Open Office to install :-)), the second hides unpredictable scenarios. In fact, after the test of the Office automation using the simple application form in the example, I try to export the code in a windows service process. The code is the same you can find in this MSDN article:

   1: try

   2: {

   3:     // Open the source document.

   4:     wordDocument = wordApplication.Documents.Open(

   5:         ref paramSourceDocPath, ref paramMissing, ref paramMissing,

   6:         ref paramMissing, ref paramMissing, ref paramMissing,

   7:         ref paramMissing, ref paramMissing, ref paramMissing,

   8:         ref paramMissing, ref paramMissing, ref paramMissing,

   9:         ref paramMissing, ref paramMissing, ref paramMissing,

  10:         ref paramMissing);

  11:  

  12:     // Export it in the specified format.

  13:     if (wordDocument != null)

  14:         wordDocument.ExportAsFixedFormat(paramExportFilePath,

  15:             paramExportFormat, paramOpenAfterExport, 

  16:             paramExportOptimizeFor, paramExportRange, paramStartPage,

  17:             paramEndPage, paramExportItem, paramIncludeDocProps, 

  18:             paramKeepIRM, paramCreateBookmarks, paramDocStructureTags, 

  19:             paramBitmapMissingFonts, paramUseISO19005_1,

  20:             ref paramMissing);

  21: }

  22: catch (Exception ex)

  23: {

  24:     // Respond to the error

  25: }

  26: finally

  27: {

  28:     // Close and release the Document object.

  29:     if (wordDocument != null)

  30:     {

  31:         wordDocument.Close(ref paramMissing, ref paramMissing,

  32:             ref paramMissing);

  33:         wordDocument = null;

  34:     }

  35:  

  36:     // Quit Word and release the ApplicationClass object.

  37:     if (wordApplication != null)

  38:     {

  39:         wordApplication.Quit(ref paramMissing, ref paramMissing,

  40:             ref paramMissing);

  41:         wordApplication = null;

  42:     }

  43:     

  44:     GC.Collect();

  45:     GC.WaitForPendingFinalizers();

  46:     GC.Collect();

  47:     GC.WaitForPendingFinalizers();

  48: }

I need to tell you that my dev environment is based on Windows Server 2008 (x86) with the latest SP. When I tried to convert the first doc file using the service, I receive the bitter newness. Despite the code were the same, convert process failed. Debugging, I found out that Word could not open the file and returned a null object (see row 13 in above code block).
Google searching response, further the “Microsoft does not support Office server side automation (for version till 2007 – see here)” notice, says that other guys experienced in same problem using Windows 2008 services (see this post). So, I tried the same custom service in a virtual machine with Windows Server 2003 and all went well. With an in deep search I’ve found other very usefully posts regarding Windows 2008 Server family lack about a particular folders. In detail:

• for x64 system is necessary to create the following folder:
  C:\Windows\SysWOW64\config\systemprofile\Desktop
• for x86 system:
  C:\Windows\System32\config\systemprofile\Desktop

After this little tip, also Windows Server 2008 service resumed to work well providing the Office automation desired.

References:

• Generate PDF Using C#
• Convert Word-Documents to PDF on an ASP.NET Server
• Saving Word 2007 Documents to PDF and XPS Formats
• Considerations for server-side Automation of Office
• Word Automation through Windows service (Windows Server 2008) - Problem
• Excel 2007 automation on top of a Windows Server 2008 x64
• Word Interop Not Working In A Scheduled Task

Save to delicious 0 saves