Is there an easy way to determine or get the applicable XPath expression from a Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.XMLNode instance at runtime?  Or do I have to navigate through the XMLNodes and build the XPath string myself?

I have some C++ code that we use in VSTO to build the XPath for XMLNode which validates against schema etc. It is not an exact sample code that you are looking for. I will do this one time to save you time but please understand that it is the last time I am doing this - I have work to do as well.

The idea though is something like this:

// built the list of namespaces and basenames from the leaf node
// up the tree
List<string> namespaces = new List<string>;
List<string> basenames = new List<string>;
while (xmlNode.Parent() != null)
{
   string namespaceURI = xmlnode.NamespaceURI;
   string  baseName = xmlnode.BaseName;

   namespaces.Add(namespaceURI);
   basenames.Add(baseName);
}

// iterate the lists backwards and construct the XPath
StringBuilder xpath = new StringBuilder;
int idx = 0;
int count = namespaces.Count();
for(idx = count - 1 ; idx >= 0 ; idx--)
{
    xpath.Append("/" + namespaces[idx] + ":" + basenames);
}

You can of course alias the namespace to get shorter paths. This is left as an exercise for the reader.

Hope it helps,
Misha

Yep, not built in support. We build XPath ourselves by navigating to the root element.

Do you have a sample of that code? It would save me some time.

I have some C++ code that we use in VSTO to build the XPath for XMLNode which validates against schema etc. It is not an exact sample code that you are looking for. I will do this one time to save you time but please understand that it is the last time I am doing this - I have work to do as well.

The idea though is something like this:

// built the list of namespaces and basenames from the leaf node
// up the tree
List<string> namespaces = new List<string>;
List<string> basenames = new List<string>;
while (xmlNode.Parent() != null)
{
   string namespaceURI = xmlnode.NamespaceURI;
   string  baseName = xmlnode.BaseName;

   namespaces.Add(namespaceURI);
   basenames.Add(baseName);
}

// iterate the lists backwards and construct the XPath
StringBuilder xpath = new StringBuilder;
int idx = 0;
int count = namespaces.Count();
for(idx = count - 1 ; idx >= 0 ; idx--)
{
    xpath.Append("/" + namespaces[idx] + ":" + basenames);
}

You can of course alias the namespace to get shorter paths. This is left as an exercise for the reader.

Hope it helps,
Misha