Downloading a Document Template from SharePoint

Since I've wasted a couple of hours on this I'll share my findings.  I'm creating a web service that will do a mail merge for me using Aspose Words. The document template is stored in a SharePoint document library as a content type and the merged document I want to store back into the document library. 

I tackled the upload first.  Since my web service and SharePoint will be installed on separate servers, I call the SharePoint Copy.asmx web service to upload the document. That works fine.  My next task was to use the document template from SharePoint which I need to retrieve as a memory stream. 

The preferred method is to use the GetItem method of the Copy.asmx service. No problem I thought as I already has a reference to it. 

But try as I might I could not manage to download the template.  When you install a content type as a template the path to the document is something like this

DocLib/Forms/Some Letter/SomeLetter.dotx

I suspect it was something to do with this location that it would not work.  If I tried the same code on a document in the library itself it worked fine.  I gave up in frustration and started Googling for alternatives.

I came up with this incredibly simple approach which I share below.  It simply uses the DownloadData method of the WebClient.  Since I know the absolute path of the template, it works a treat.


public MemoryStream DownloadSharePointDocument(string sourceUrl)
{
   string sharePointSiteUrl = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["sharepointsiteurl"];

   if (!sharePointSiteUrl.EndsWith("/"))
   {
        sharePointSiteUrl = sharePointSiteUrl + "/";
   }
   sourceUrl = sharePointSiteUrl + sourceUrl;
    WebClient wc = new WebClient();
   wc.UseDefaultCredentials = true;

   byte[] response = wc.DownloadData(sourceUrl);
   MemoryStream ms = HelperMethods.MemoryStreamFromBytes(response);
   return ms;

}