How to Add Comments to Paragraphs in Word Documents using Node.js

Once we’ve loaded our DOCX files into web viewers in our applications, we can begin to make programmatic edits to those files with a few simple API calls.

Using the below code, we can take advantage of a free API that allows us to insert new comments next to a specific paragraph in a DOCX file. To structure our input request, we’ll need to know our paragraph path, and we’ll need to set various details about our comment, including the author's name & initials, comment text, and more:

{
  "InputFileBytes": "string",
  "InputFileUrl": "string",
  "ParagraphPath": "string",
  "CommentToInsert": {
    "Path": "string",
    "Author": "string",
    "AuthorInitials": "string",
    "CommentText": "string",
    "CommentDate": "2023-12-20T16:19:34.524Z",
    "IsTopLevel": true,
    "IsReply": true,
    "ParentCommentPath": "string",
    "Done": true
  }
}

To structure our API call, we can begin by installing the SDK. We can do that either by running this command:

npm install cloudmersive-convert-api-client --save

Or by adding this snippet to our package.json:

  "dependencies": {
    "cloudmersive-convert-api-client": "^2.6.3"
  }

Then we can add the below code into our file and pass in our input reqeust. We’ll also need to use a free-tier API key to authorize our request, which will allow a limit of 800 API calls per month & no commitments:

var CloudmersiveConvertApiClient = require('cloudmersive-convert-api-client');
var defaultClient = CloudmersiveConvertApiClient.ApiClient.instance;

// Configure API key authorization: Apikey
var Apikey = defaultClient.authentications['Apikey'];
Apikey.apiKey = 'YOUR API KEY';



var apiInstance = new CloudmersiveConvertApiClient.EditDocumentApi();

var reqConfig = new CloudmersiveConvertApiClient.DocxInsertCommentOnParagraphRequest(); // DocxInsertCommentOnParagraphRequest | Document input request


var callback = function(error, data, response) {
  if (error) {
    console.error(error);
  } else {
    console.log('API called successfully. Returned data: ' + data);
  }
};
apiInstance.editDocumentDocxInsertCommentOnParagraph(reqConfig, callback);

That will input our comment(s), but we’re not quite done yet. The API response will return a temporary editing document URL, and in order to convert that URL into finalized DOCX encoding, we’ll need to call another specialized API:

var CloudmersiveConvertApiClient = require('cloudmersive-convert-api-client');
var defaultClient = CloudmersiveConvertApiClient.ApiClient.instance;

// Configure API key authorization: Apikey
var Apikey = defaultClient.authentications['Apikey'];
Apikey.apiKey = 'YOUR API KEY';



var apiInstance = new CloudmersiveConvertApiClient.EditDocumentApi();

var reqConfig = new CloudmersiveConvertApiClient.FinishEditingRequest(); // FinishEditingRequest | Cloudmersive Document URL to complete editing on


var callback = function(error, data, response) {
  if (error) {
    console.error(error);
  } else {
    console.log('API called successfully. Returned data: ' + data);
  }
};
apiInstance.editDocumentFinishEditing(reqConfig, callback);

Now we can easily add comments to DOCX files and download updated documents from our Node.js applications.