Aspose.Words Ignores Protection Exclusion for Selected Areas when Generating Word Documents

As per the following thread, http://www.aspose.com/community/forums/showthread.aspx?PostID=153354&Subj=document-protection#153354, Aspose.Words will completely ignore your selection-based exclusions when you are trying to lock/protect parts of a document - and there is no fix expected for the next 3-6 months. This is unfortunate as it is a very powerful feature when generating MS Word documents that should only be partially editable.

It is not a viable option to use Form fields and section-based security as it only allows data entry without the ability to change any formatting (this was the workaround suggested by Aspose for now). My client has reluctantly accepted that this is an inherent limitation of the document generation section in our ASP.NET application.

One interesting element in Aspose.Word's implementation is their use of tags to delimit repeating data within table. You pass in a DataSet and it will use the field names (presumably via reflection) to render the fields of your list into a Word table.

See below for an example of the table-binding syntax of Aspose.Word. Note the «TableStart:TableName»«Field1»«Field2»«TableEnd:TableName» syntax.