AE Effect Controls Panel Opening Issue

Question

I have written a script that adds an effect to the currently selected layer and then automatically opens the Effect Controls panel.
Because app.findMenuCommandId("Effect Controls") toggles the panel (opens or closes it),

it does not meet my needs.

Therefore I used the menu command "3734": "OpenEffectControls" instead,

as shown in the code below:

var cmdId = app.findMenuCommandId("Open Effect Controls");
app.executeCommand(cmdId);

However, the panel does not open when no layer is selected, and it also fails to open when the selected layer is a shape layer.

The panel opens correctly only when the selected layer is an AV (footage) layer.

Is this a limitation of After Effects itself?

What approach can guarantee that the Effect Controls panel opens automatically regardless of which type of layer is selected?

AidanEdits · Accepted Answer

"Open Effect Controls" is a contextual AV Layer command, so yes unfortunately it is limited to only AV Layers. From what I can tell, there also is no way to determine whether or not a panel is currently open or closed (unless is it a custom UI panel). So there's no way to tell AE to first check the current state of the panel, then decide whether or not to toggle based on the current state. Ultimately, it appears you've run into a scripting limitation.

If you're willing to spare an extra click, you could put app.executeCommand("Effect Controls") inside a condition controlled by a simple Yes/No prompt. So before the command is executed, a prompt asks the user if they'd like to open Effect Controls. If you already have the Effect Controls panel open, you'd select No, telling the script not to execute app.executeCommand("Effect Controls"). If the panel is closed, choose Yes to tell the script to execute the toggle and open the panel. Is it quicker than just hitting F3 to manually toggle the Effect Controls panel? No. But if the script absolutely must open Effect Controls, this is probably your best bet.

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