Technical Architecture

Overview

ContractExpress Author is an add-in for Microsoft Word 2007 and Microsoft Word 2010. It provides tools and functions to allow template authors to create templates for the ContractExpress family of document assembly solutions.

Technology

ContractExpress Author is a managed COM add-in built on Microsoft .Net 4.0. It is developed using the Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) 2010 development tools in Visual Studio 2010. VSTO allows extensions to the Office applications to be written in .Net which, when deployed, are then hosted inside the Office application. The ContractExpress Author add-in then interacts with the Microsoft Word object model through the primary interop assemblies (PIA) for the application.

Deployment

The ContractExpress Author add-in is deployed using Microsoft’s ClickOnce technology. This is a non-MSI based deployment technology that deploys the application on a per user basis. To allow the ContractExpress Author add-in to deploy and run requires the Visual Studio Tools for Office 2010 runtime. The ContractExpress Author setup files will install the necessary prerequisites such as the VSTO 2010 runtime and the Primary Interop Assemblies.

Application Updates

The ContractExpress Author add-in will keep up to date automatically. This is a feature of the ClickOnce deployment technology. Each week, the add-in checks the location from where it was installed to see if there is a new build, and will download and install the new version.

One Author solution, multiple document assembly delivery solutions

Templates created in ContractExpress Author can be deployed to the ContractExpress DealBuilder, ContractExpress for SharePoint or ContractExpress Cloud document assembly solutions. The same Author client can be used interchangeably with all delivery solutions. ContractExpress Author connects to web services exposed by the document assembly solutions to upload templates and users can easily switch which web service they are connecting to in the Options dialog.

Background scanning of character-based mark-up language

Templates in the ContractExpress Author application are based upon the ContractExpress Mark-up Language (CEML). This mark-up is based on regular characters such as square brackets [ ] and curly brackets { }. As a user types new mark-up objects into the template, these mark-up objects are automatically recognised by ContractExpress Author by a process which is scanning the ContractExpress template as a background process. Once a mark-up object has been identified, the object can be defined inside the ContractExpress Author task-pane.