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davidt12412601
Inspiring
October 14, 2022
Answered

Is it possible to retrieve the URL status for hyperlinks via script?

  • October 14, 2022
  • 2 replies
  • 427 views

InDesign obviously stores the status of hyperlinks it has checked, but I can't find a property that holds the status. I'm using InDesign version 16.4.3.

 

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Correct answer m1b

Hi @davidt12412601, I had a look at hyperlinks and hyperlinkURLDestination objects and couldn't find any sign of what you want either. The closest thing was a method of Hyperlink called showDestination() which will attempt to open the URL in your default web browser.

- Mark

2 replies

m1b
Community Expert
m1bCommunity ExpertCorrect answer
Community Expert
October 14, 2022

Hi @davidt12412601, I had a look at hyperlinks and hyperlinkURLDestination objects and couldn't find any sign of what you want either. The closest thing was a method of Hyperlink called showDestination() which will attempt to open the URL in your default web browser.

- Mark

davidt12412601
Inspiring
October 17, 2022

Thanks for investigating, Mark. I guess I'll sadly mark your answer as correct.

I'm trying to check for bad links in a set of roughly 100 files, each of which contains on average 1000 hyperlinks. In our use case, once a link is valid, it will always be valid. At the moment, we manually open each doc, enable automatic URL status updates, and let InDesign check all the links. I would like to automate that routine maintenance. Saving the time it takes to recheck each link would be great, but at least letting the system check unattended would be helpful.

 

Unfortunately, it looks like we'll have to continue to have a person open each file, wait for the status to update, and visually check the hyperlinks panel. Oh, well.