CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#.netms-officepowerpointoffice-interop
Yaroslav Yakovlev
Yaroslav Yakovlev

Reputation: 6483

How to retrieve links between PowerPoint slides within a presentation

I`m looking for a way to read a links between slides in single PowerPoint presentation. I need to open a PowerPoint file and retrieve all links slides have to each other.

Right now I`m using Aspose but it appears they do not have anything to read links between slides.

I've read some more about the PowerPoint 2007/2010 file format and found out that it`s just a zip archive. After renaming it you can see all the xml data inside it. Does anybody know which one of the many xml files inside it contains information what slide is linked and to what slide?

I need to do it in C# or VB.NET.

Upvotes: 4

Views: 1904

Answers (2)

Corey Larson
Corey Larson

Reputation: 1607

To accomplish this in C#, here is a good method to find the linked slide:

    private int GetSlideIndexFromHyperlink(Hyperlink hyperlink)
    {
        var subAddrParts = hyperlink.SubAddress.Split(',');
        return int.Parse(subAddrParts[1]);
    }

Note that the Hyperlink is found within the desired ActionSettings for the Shape you care about (in my case it was shape.ActionSettings[PpMouseActivation.ppMouseClick].

The sub-address for linking in PowerPoint is formatted like SlideId,SlideIndex,SlideTitle. It should be rather simple to obtain the other parts(if desired) with this method via some small tweaks.

Upvotes: 0

Todd Main
Todd Main

Reputation: 29155

There's no need to go to OpenXML here if you don't have to - this can be done with the Object Model. Here's how it is done in VBA, which can easily be ported to C# or VB.NET.

Sub PrintInteralLinks()
    Dim ap As Presentation
    Set ap = ActivePresentation
    Dim hs As Hyperlinks
    Dim h As Hyperlink
    Dim sl As Slide
    Dim linkedToSlide As String
    Dim slideTitle As Integer
    For Each sl In ap.Slides
        Set hs = sl.Hyperlinks
        For Each h In hs
            slideTitle = InStrRev(h.SubAddress, ",")
            If slideTitle > 0 Then
                linkedToSlide = Mid(h.SubAddress, slideTitle + 1)
                Debug.Print sl.Name & " links to " & linkedToSlide
            End If
        Next
    Next
End Sub

The slideTitle = InStrRev(h.SubAddress, ",") isn't fool-proof though. The pattern for internal links is #,#,Slide Title, so you may have to make this better with like some RegEx.

Upvotes: 2

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