PptxPath

Introduction

PptxPath is available in Advanced and Premium licenses. This feature facilitates the low level work with PPTX presentations through easy but powerful methods that allow you to delete, clone, move and return almost any PowerPoint content.

This feature benefits from the flexibility that a set of options adds. This set allows to filter by content type, position, text, parents, attributes or dynamic queries.

For example, it is possible to move an image to another slide, get elements information, remove paragraphs that contains a certain text, delete one or more rows from a table, clone and move slides... The possibilities of PptxPath are almost endless.

PptxPath is compatible with new presentations and templates.

Remove elements

removeElement: this method deletes existing elements in the presentation.

require_once 'classes/CreatePptx.php';

// it is possible to use PptxPath with a new presentation or a template
$pptx = new CreatePptxFromTemplate('template.pptx');

// remove the second slide
$referenceNode = array(
    'type' => 'slide',
    'occurrence' => 2,
);
$pptx->removeElement($referenceNode);

$pptx->savePptx('output');

Clone elements

cloneElement: this method clones existing elements.

require_once 'classes/CreatePptx.php';

// it is possible to use PptxPath with a new presentation or a template
$pptx = new CreatePptxFromTemplate('template.pptx');

// clone the first paragraph
$referenceNode = array(
    'type' => 'paragraph',
    'occurrence' => 1,
);
$pptx->cloneElement($referenceNode);

// change the active slide position
$pptx->setActiveSlide(array('position' => 1));

// clone the first paragraph that contains 'features' text
$referenceNode = array(
    'type' => 'paragraph',
    'contains' => 'features',
);
$pptx->cloneElement($referenceNode);

$pptx->savePptx('output');

Move elements

moveElement: this method moves existing elements in the presentation to another slide.

require_once 'classes/CreatePptx.php';

// it is possible to use PptxPath with a new presentation or a template
$pptx = new CreatePptxFromTemplate('template.pptx');

// move the second shape in the active slide to the fourth slide
$referenceNode = array(
    'type' => 'shape',
    'occurrence' => 2,
);
$referenceNodeTo = array(
    'type' => 'slide',
    'occurrence' => 4,
);
$pptx->moveElement($referenceNode, $referenceNodeTo);

// change the active slide position
$pptx->setActiveSlide(array('position' => 2));

$pptx->savePptx('output');

Get PPTX elements and query information

If you need to obtain information about the data the XPath query returns, you can run the getPptxPathQueryInfo method. Thanks to this new method it is possible to get the elements and the string of the query.

require_once 'classes/CreatePptx.php';

// it is possible to use PptxPath with a new presentation or a template
$pptx = new CreatePptxFromTemplate('template.pptx');

$referenceNode = array(
    'type' => 'slide',
);
$queryInfo = $pptx->getPptxPathQueryInfo($referenceNode);
var_dump($queryInfo);

if ($queryInfo['elements']->length > 0) {
    foreach ($queryInfo['elements'] as $element) {
        var_dump($element->ownerDocument->saveXML($element));
    }
}

Tips

If the option occurrence is not set all references of the query will be changed.
When setting a referenceNode it is mandatory to employ at least one of the available options.
If you need to set the last occurrence of an element you can use the value -1. The first element is always 1, unlike PHP arrays, in which the first element is 0.