Opening a Word (.doc) Document from a stream

I have a bunch of Wor开发者_JS百科d documents (.doc) stored in my SQL database that I need open, clean the properties such as Title, Subject etc and then save the file back to the database.

Is it even possible to open a ".doc" file from a stream?

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Word is not able to open .doc files from a stream in memory. To open the file you would have to save the document to a temporary location first.

However, Word's little-known RTF converter interface can be used to load documents from streams in RTF format. If using RTF instead of the binary format is an option for you¹, you might want to have a look at the WinWord Converter SDK:

How to Obtain the WinWord Converter SDK (GC1039)

For an import converter you would have to implement the ForeignToRtf method that will be called by Word to receive the RTF input.

^{1_{Actually you can still save the files in the .doc format; however, you would have to convert the .doc file to RTF first using the SDK and then open the RTF stream in Word. The conversion from the binary format to RTF and vice versa should be mostly lossless as the RTF format has been developed in sync with the binary format. However, it should be borne in mind that using the RTF converter interface will not allow you to use any of the new features introduced with OpenXML/Office 2010.}}

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I'm pretty sure the Word DOCUMENT object implements IPersistStream (the COM interface). I +KNOW+ it implements IPersistFile.

It's not the easiest thing to work with, and since it's COM, it doesn't interoperate well with .net streams, but I believe it'd be doable using IPersistStream.