ADAM DocMaker gives you the necessary tools to manage the creation and editing of your InDesign documents. Apart from the out of the box DocMaker Studio, a robust DocMaker API is also available to build your own custom solution from scratch.

InDesign provides the tools to create professional layouts for print. Needless to say that the layout is also very important when editing documents using DocMaker. Our Studio provides page-by-page previews which makes it possible to select each individual element by clicking it.
For custom solutions, the API also provides all necessary tools to visualize each box on the pages in the document. By using this solution, users can easily see which textbox needs to be edited. But what if you do not need a shiny user interface?

You want to create a solution that updates text in boxes without user interaction. How is it possible then to know which textbox to load to replace the text in it. This post provides some possibilities to do this.

Loading by ID

The easiest way is to load your elements by ID. This is really straight forward:

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Document document;
TextElement element = (TextElement)document.GetElement("elementId");

Story story = element.Story;
story.FromHtml(htmlValue);

Once your element is loaded, contents is easily updated using the FromHtml method on the Story. If you want more advanced options for editing the contents, you can use the API to change, create or remove Paragraphs or Runs manually in the Story.

Without ID

By contents

What if you want to load your story or textelement by contents? An InDesign document template has 5 boxes: one header, three body elements and one footer. Suppose the text in the header is 'header', in the bodies 'body1', 'body2' and 'body3'. Let's take a look how to load the element that contains 'header'.

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Document document;
TextElement textElement = null;
List<Story> stories = document.Stories
    .Where(story => story.ToText().Equals('header', StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase))
    .ToList();
if(stories.Count == 1)
{
    Story story = stories[0];
    // You have the desired story, so you can start editing.
    // If you still need the TextElement containing this story, 
    // you can use this expresion.
    textElement = document.GetElement(
        element => element.OwnerStory == story) as TextElement;
}

By Coordinates

As mentioned in the introduction it is possible to draw every element on a page preview using the API. You may not want to provide a user interface, but it is still possible to use this information to load the top box (header) of the page for example. Let's take a look...

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// Start by loading all textelements on a specified page
Page page = document.Pages[0];
IList<TextElement> elements = page.GetAllElements()         
     .OfType<TextElement>().ToList();

TextElement element = elements.OrderBy(e => e.Shape.Bounds.Top).First();

By Tag

The latest version of the DocMaker API has en extended to work with InDesign Tags. Adobe InDesign has the ability to tag Elements, stories, text fragments, ... With DocMaker 3.1, it is possible to read and rename tags, and read, edit and remove attributes of these tags.

We again have the InDesign document from previous example. Suppose the same 5 boxes, containing real (unknown) text. Each box is tagged in InDesign. The name of the tags are 'header', 'body1', ...

In following snippet we first get all textelements. From these elements, the one with tage 'header' is loaded.

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IList<textelement> elements = 
  document.EnumerateAllElements().OfType<TextElement>().ToList();
TextElement element = elements
     .Where(e => (e.Tag != null) && (e.Tag.Name == "header"))
     .First();
Story story = element.Story;

// In case you also need the information in the attributes in the tag.
Tag tag = element.Tag;
IDictionary<string,string> attributes = tag.Attributes;
foreach(string attributeKey in attributes.Keys)
{
    string attributeValue = attributes[attributeKey];
    // Process, change, ... the attributes.
}

In this blog we have shared some possibilities to load the desired stories or textelements in a document. Of course there are still many other possibilities. The used snippets are only there to give you a thought of what's possible.