How to edit MS Word documents using Java?

Question

I do have few Word templates, and my requirement is to replace some of the words/place holders in the document based on the user input, using Java. I tried lot of libraries

Answer 1

Stepping back a bit, there are about 4 different approaches for editing words/placeholders:

• MERGEFIELD or DOCPROPERTY fields (if you are having problems with this in docx4j, then you have probably not set up your input docx correctly)
• content control databinding
• variable replacement on the document surface (either at the DOM/SAX level, or using a library)
• do stuff as XHTML, then import that

Before choosing one, you should decide whether you also need to be able to handle:

• repeating data (eg adding table rows)
• conditional content (eg entire paragraphs which will either be present or absent)
• adding images

If you need these, then MERGEFIELD or DOCPROPERTY fields are probably out (though you can also use IF fields, if you can find a library which supports them). And adding images makes DOM/SAX manipulation as advocated in one of the other answers, messier and error prone.

The other things to consider are:

• your authors: how technical are they? What does that imply for the authoring UI?
• the "user input" you mention for variable replacement, is this given, or is obtaining it part of the problem you are solving?