Looking to generate a GUID

I never found the doc very good on XML, some stuff said in the documentation never worked for me, but it might be my fault ... But you should definitely read it to check what I'm saying.

I'm copy pasting stuff from my old code because I don't really remember all the details, this is my own way of doing things so maybe not the best.

To init an XML I'd either create it like xml = new XML() or if I already have most of the data I need:

xml = <propertySet><info>Created by Library {version}</info></propertySet>

... where version is a double.

Then, to keep things simple I'd append the data by constructing a subtree in another function:

xml.info += getLayerData();

This actually puts the layer data node at the same level as the info node (if I remember properly).

In getLayerData there would be a loop doing the same thing: appending the tree constructed for each layers. Same thing for each layer: there would be a loop on each keyframe, mask, effect, etc. I found this kept things clean and it was simpler to build the XML. Here's the function that gets the keyframes, all the other functions work more or less this way:

function getXMLForKeyframes(type, property)
{
          var xml = null;
          var tmp;
          if (property.numKeys > 0)
          {
                    var keyframe;
                    xml = <keyframes></keyframes>;
                    xml.interpolation = getKeyframeInterpolationType(property.keyframeInterpolationType);
                    for (var i=1; i<=property.numKeys; i++)
                    {
                              tmp = getXMLForKeyframe(type, property, i);
                              switch ( i )
                              {
                                        case 1:
                                                  //  Don't use += if the node is empty or you'll create an extra empty field
                                                  xml.keyframes = tmp;
                                                  break;
                                        default:
                                                  xml.keyframes += tmp;
                                                  break;
                              }
                    }
          }
          return xml;
}

To add a property to the xml, you just have to do xml.propertyName = content , and content can be about anything.

To add a field to the XML tag, do xml.@fieldName = value, and value only should be a number or string I guess.

Concerning the file paths, I think fsName of the best way to go but I'm not sure why you use decode on it. If you want something OS-dependent use fsName otherwise I think it's path. Just try them all and combine them as you were planning to do, I wouldn't call any of that a hack.