Friday, August 31, 2007

Word COM Interop: Problems With Application.Selection

Most code samples out there use the Application.Selection component for creating Word documents with COM Interop. From the Word object model documentation:

The Selection object represents the area that is currently selected. When you perform an operation in the Word user interface, such as bolding text, you select, or highlight, the text and then apply the formatting. The Selection object is always present in a document. If nothing is selected, then it represents the insertion point. In addition, it can also be multiple blocks of text that are not contiguous.


Often those code samples do not even bother to set the selection beforehand (e.g. by invoking Document.Range(begin, end).Select()), as they misconceive that Application.Selection just keeps on matching while they insert content to the end of the document. Even with Range.Select() there are potantial race conditions, as we will soon see...

The problem here becomes obvious when taking a closer look at the object model: the Selection object is attached to the Application object, not to the Document object. If the application's active document changes, its selection will refer to a different document than before.

Now it still seems to be save at first sight as long as the caller operates on one document only, but not even this is the case: If the user opens a Word document from his desktop in the meantime, this is not going to fork a new Word process, but the new document will be attached to the running Word Interop process (hence the same Application). This Application has run window-less in the background so far, but now will pop up a Word window, where the user can watch in real-time how the Interop code suddenly manipulates the WRONG document, because from this moment on Application.Selection refers to the newly opened document.

How come this simple fact is not mentioned in the API documentation? I have found several newsgroup postings on that issue, people are struggling with this. So what might be a possible solution? Working with the Range API on document ranges (e.g. Document.Range(begin, end)), instead of application selections.

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