Threaded comments

EPPlus supports threaded comments from version 5.3. With threaded comments users can add comments to a thread that belongs to a cell in a worksheet. The users can mention eachother in the comments and the entire thread can be resolved (closed/locked) and re-opened. EPPlus 5 supports all of these features. Threaded comments exists in several spreadsheet programs, however the EPPlus 5 implementation is designed to cover most of the functionality in Excel/Office 365.

For backward compatibility cells with a threaded comments also contains a "legacy comment", that replicates the content of the thread. This comment will be overwritten with new content when opened in a spreadsheet program that supports threaded comments.

Persons

When a user adds a threaded comment in Excel/Office 365 the user is added to a collection of Persons in the workbook. With EPPlus 5 you can read/edit/delete these users, see code below.

var persons = package.Workbook.ThreadedCommentPersons;

You can add a new person this way:

var p1 = persons.Add("John Doe");
//This method call above is using default parameters same as below
var p2 = persons.Add("John Doe", "John Doe", IdentityProvider.NoProvider);

The Persons collection is also available via the worksheet (this is editing the same underlying data as when you use the property on the worksheet), see code below.

var sheet = package.Workbook.Worksheets.First();
var author = sheet.ThreadedComments.Persons.First();

The Persons collection exposes functions for an indexer (numeric index and id (string)) and properties/methods such as Count, Find, Remove.

IdentityProvider enum

This enum represent the for different sources that are supported:

• NoProvider - The person is not represented in a catalog outside the workbook
• ActiveDirectory - The person corresponds to an Active directory user. Person's userId should be an ActiveDirectory Security Identifier (SID).
• WindowsLiveId - The person corresponds to a Windows Live user. Person's userId should be a 64-bit signed decimal that uniquely identifies a user on Windows Live.
• Office365 - The person corresponds to an Office 365 user. The Person's userId should be a string that uniquely identifies a user. It SHOULD be comprised of three individual values separated by a "::" delimiter.
• PeoplePicker - The person corresponds to a People Picker user. The Persons userId should be an email address provided by People Picker.

Read more about managing persons here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_standards/ms-xlsx/6274371e-7c5c-46e3-b661-cbeb4abfe968

Adding comments

The comment threads can be accessed either on worksheet level or directly via a cell.

using (var package = new ExcelPackage())
{
    var sheet = package.Workbook.Worksheets.Add("test");
    var person = sheet.ThreadedComments.Persons.Add("John Doe");
    var person2 = sheet.ThreadedComments.Persons.Add("Jane Doe");
    var thread = sheet.Cells["A1"].AddThreadedComment();
    var c1 = thread.AddComment(person2.Id, "Hello");
    // Mention Jane Doe (person2) in the comment.
    var c2 = thread.AddComment(person.Id, "Hello {0}, how are you?", person2);
}

This code will result in this thread:

Mentions

You can mention one or more persons in a comment. Continuing with the code above, we can mention both John and Jane like this

var person3 = sheet.ThreadedComments.Persons.Add("IT Support");
thread.AddComment(person3.Id, "Hello {0} and {1}, do you need any assistance today?", person, person2);

As you can see, the way of inserting mentions works similar to the .NET string.Format method. You can mention a person more than once in a comment, but only the first occurance will be a "proper" mention.

The mentions in a comment can be read using the comments Mentions property.

foreach(var mention in c2.Mentions)
{
    var id = mention.MentionId;
    var mentionPersonId = mention.MentionPersonId;
    var startIndex = mention.StartIndex;
    var length = mention.Length;
}

Notifications

In Office 365, when a user inserts a mention in a comment an email is sent as a notification to the mentioned person. Please note that EPPlus doesn't send notifications. If you want to send notifications when you create a mention you need to use data from the Persons collection, connect to your IdentityProvider and retrieve the information needed to send a notification.

Edit a comment

The Text property of a comment is readonly. Use the EditText function to change the text of an existing comment. With the EditText function you can set a new text on the comment with or without mentions.

c2.EditText("Hello");
c2.EditText("Hello {0}, I have edited your comment!", person);

Resolve/Re-open a thread

You can resolve (lock the thread for new comments) and re-open a thread by using the ResolveThread and ReopenThread methods.

sheet1.ThreadedComments["A1"].ResolveThread();
sheet1.ThreadedComments["A1"].ReopenThread();

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See also

More detailed examples in our sample projects: Sample 1.5-C# and Sample 1.5-VB