I have posted before about a method of editing the SharePoint Document properties on a Word document in Office 2010 (and Office 2007). I just found something that completely blew my mind. I spent hours and hours battling with CustomXMLParts, Protected and Readonly documents, and a Save-As dialog… and found out that all that effort was pretty much wasted.

Behold:
_Document.ContentTypeProperties Property
Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.Document.ContentTypeProperties

ContentTypeProperties is a collection of MetaProperty objects representing (possibly among other things) the SharePoint properties displayed in the server document properties panel. And you can edit them.

So instead of a mess of XML xpath, namespaces, exception handling and “_x0020_”‘s , if you want to edit a sharepoint list column called “Task Id”, you would do the following:

doc.ContentTypeProperties["Task Id"].Value = "task1";

(Yes, you still might need some exception handling…)

The CustomXMLParts will be updated appropriately, and when you save it to sharepoint, the properties will be populated.

Have a look at the members of the MetaProperty object:
.Name = sharepoint internal column name: “Task Id”
.Id = escaped column name: “Task_x0020_Id”
The other properties are what you would expect.

Please note that this will only work if the word document has been “touched” by SharePoint. See my next post for a quick (and undocumented) method of getting those properties attached in Word 2010.