For our SaaS (LAMP) product reporting we are currently using JasperReports. We find it too cumbersome to develop reports with and the output in Word unworkable. Moreover, a couple of customers request to be able to develop simple reports themselves (to be used as mail merge). We would therefore like to develop templates right in Word. The idea is to have an application/webservice that would receive the Word template and JSON data from the LAMP application and return the filled-in report. The report has to support:
This is the functionality we are using in JasperReports right now. Are there existing solutions to this? I've found quite a lot that can substitute simple variables, but no info about the the above three points. Will it be a lot of effort to write one from scratch? I would prefer a Windows OpenXML-based solution rather than a Linux PHPOffice-based one as I presume the former would handle the text split by spell-checker and language tags (though I'm not sure).
Windward and Docmosis are both commercial products that support the features you've listed and they are intended to be added to your application to provide reporting capabilities. Neither is are not OpenXML based. They can use Word documents as templates and perform the data merge into different output formats. Please note I work for Docmosis.
Aspose Words is another tool and it can populate a template but most of the power is through code rather than controls/directives in the template. Given your OpenXML thoughts, perhaps this is more what you are looking for.
More tools are recommended here in StackExchange.
I hope that helps.