For developers wondering about Microsoft’s commitment to content controls, Office 2013 was certainly good news.

In Microsoft’s “What’s new for Word 2013 developers”, 2 of the 4 items were about content controls:

• Enhancements to content controls
• UI for XML mappings

And in http://blogs.office.com/2012/10/17/top-5-reasons-developers-will-love-word-2013/ 4 of the 5 reasons relate to content controls!

The MSDN article “What’s new with content controls in Word 2013” describes the changes in detail, but one of them was the introduction of repeating section content controls, which are comparable to OpenDoPE repeats (which docx4j has supported for ages).

The question is whether the time is ripe to migrate from OpenDoPE repeats to Word 2013 repeatingSection content controls?

My suggested answer is “no, or at least, not yet”, because

1. Word 2010 strips out Word 2013 repeating content controls, and does so without warning!  Compare OpenDoPE repeats, which work in Word 2007, 2010 and 2013.  So until Word 2010 becomes irrelevant (or support is back ported), Word 2013 repeating content controls can’t be used in a generic solution.
2. Word 2013 doesn’t handle the case of repeat zero times as you’d expect; it leaves a single instance, which will cause problems in many applications.

For authoring, the XML Mapping Pane in Word 2013 also leaves a bit to be desired.  For more details, please see w15RepeatingSection_cf_OpenDoPE.docx

Even so, docx4j 3.2.2 will support processing Word 2013 repeating content controls, for those who still choose to use them.