How to replace text with a MS Word web add-in by preserving the formatting? - ms-word

Question

I'm working on a simple grammar correction web add-in for MS Word. Basically, I want to get the selected text, make minimal changes and update the document with the corrected text. Currently, if I use 'text' as the coercion type, I lose formatting. If there is a table or image in the selected text, they are also gone!
As I understand from the investigation I've been doing so far, openxml is the way to go. But I couldn't find any useful example on the web. How can I manipulate text by preserving the original formatting data? How can I ignore non-text paragraphs? I want to be able to do this with the Office JavaScript API:

Answer 1

I would do something like this:
// get data as OOXML
Office.context.document.getSelectedDataAsync(Office.CoercionType.Ooxml, function (result) {
if (result.status === "succeeded") {
var selectionAsOOXML = result.value;
var bodyContentAsOOXML = selectionAsOOXML.match(/<w:body.*?>(.*?)<\/w:body>/)[1];
// perform manipulations to the body
// it can be difficult to do to OOXML but with som regexps it should be possible
bodyContentAsOOXML = bodyContentAsOOXML.replace(/error/g, 'rorre'); // reverse the word 'error'
// insert the body back in to the OOXML
selectionAsOOXML = selectionAsOOXML.replace(/(<w:body.*?>)(.*?)<\/w:body>/, '$1' + bodyContentAsOOXML + '<\/w:body>');
// replace the selected text with the new OOXML
Office.context.document.setSelectedDataAsync(selectionAsOOXML, { coercionType: Office.CoercionType.Ooxml }, function (asyncResult) {
if (asyncResult.status === "failed") {
console.log("Action failed with error: " + asyncResult.error.message);
}
});
}
});