17.14.20 mailMerge

This element specifies all of the mail merge information for a document that has been connected to an external data source as part of a mail merge operation.

The document which contains this mail merge data can be of one of two types:

• A source document, the document which contains all of the information for the mail merge, and is used
• in conjunction with an application to connect to an external data source and create one document for
• each record in that data source.
• A merged document, a document which contains all of the information for the mail merge as well as a
• reference to a single specific record which shall be used to populate the values of all of the merge fields
• in that document.

The information in this element shall contain all data needed to connect to a data source and populate any merge fields in the document with data from that data source.

[Example: Consider the following WordprocessingML fragment for a document which is part of a mail merge:

<w:mailMerge>
  …
  <w:dataType w:val="spreadsheet" />
  <w:query w:val="SELECT * FROM `Sheet1$`" />
  <w:dataSource r:id="rId1" />
  …
</w:mailMerge>

Here, the dataType (17.14.10) and dataSource (17.14.9) elements specify that the given document must be connected to the external data source referenced by the relationship whose id value is equal to rId1. While connected to the external data source, the document together with a hosting application can extract data from the external data source as specified by the query (17.14.26) element. end example]

[Note: The W3C XML Schema definition of this element’s note]

content model (CT_MailMerge) is located in A.1. end