Finding Office documents with hyperlinks to pages

Question

A Thursday challenge - does anyone have any good ideas for this scenario in the intranet migration (CMS2002 - SP2007) project I'm working on:

I need to identify documents on the intranet which have embedded links to pages. I can identify links to other documents (since in CMS2002, such links are in the format '/NR/rdonlyres'), but pages are more tricky as I think the only thing to pattern match on would be the extension (.aspx, .htm etc.). Remember however, that the links could be in format "Policy Document", meaning the link target itself isn't in the document content as seen by say, a search engine.

Some other challenges:

• The documents are in CMS 2002 and it would NOT be easy to write CMS code for this task. For one thing, the original source code for this solution is missing presumed dead (and there is no documentation), so building a fully-functional working VM is unlikely. I have a restored SQL db though.
• Docs are Office 2003 format

I have some ideas, but all are a time-sink compared to how much time we actually have. I love to hear about any site-scraping tools which might help here, but all suggestions welcome.

Answer 1

Don't know anything of the structure of CMS 2002 database (are the docs stored as BLOB like in sharepoint?), but the parsing of the documents themselves should be easy enough.

If you open a word 2003 document in notepad you can see the hyperlinks as they are prefixed by HYPERLINK even if they are displaying text instead of the URL.

You parse each document as a string and list out those which contain embedded links to the intranet. I don't know if you could swop out the link text and save the document back without breaking it, but you could generate a report at least.

Answer 2

Presuming you already found a way to iterate all your documents, you could load the document in C# using Microsoft.Office.Interop

for example for word use Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.Application, open the document, iterate Hyperlinks collection.

This article shows how to open documents (this is where you wish you were using C# 4 and optional arguments:-): http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/tcyt0y1f(VS.80).aspx How to: Access Office Interop Objects by Using Visual C# 2010 Features (C# Programming Guide) Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word Namespace