Why Endnotes are so broken in DOM / Scripting ...

Question

Anyone knows why Endnotes are so broken ?
 
Footnotes - are available for all Text objects:
https://www.indesignjs.de/extendscriptAPI/indesign-latest/#Footnotes.html

Object of
Cell.footnotes
Table.footnotes
Text.footnotes
Character.footnotes
Word.footnotes
Line.footnotes
TextColumn.footnotes
Paragraph.footnotes
TextStyleRange.footnotes
InsertionPoint.footnotes
TextFrame.footnotes
Story.footnotes
EndnoteTextFrame.footnotes
XmlStory.footnotes
 
But Endnotes:
https://www.indesignjs.de/extendscriptAPI/indesign-latest/#Endnotes.html

Object of
Cell.endnotes
Table.endnotes
InsertionPoint.endnotes
Story.endnotes
XmlStory.endnotes
 
So you can't iterate through Paragraphs and their Endnotes directly.
 
Another strange thing - I can't iterate through Story declared in VB as InDesign.Story - I need to declare it as a Variant - otherwise, if I try to iterate through Endnotes of the Story - I get Misatch error stright away on:
 
 For c = 1 To myLStory.Endnotes.Count
 
But I can iterate through Footnotes without a problem.
 
Then, I can't declare Endnote as InDesign.Endnote - I also need to declare it as a Variant.
 
 Dim myLEndnote As Variant ' InDesign.EndnoteDim myLStory As Variant ' InDesign.Story
 
And on top of that - I can't store a reference to it directly:
 
Set qqq = myLEndnote
 
I need to save extra reference to the .ParentStory to be able to "find" footnote using .ItemByID
 
(end of rant)

Peter Kahrel · Answer

Adobe did a pretty bad job with the scripting APIs for endnotes. It should have been parallel to the footnote scripting APIs. Some of the most glaring problems were fixed in a prerelease round, but as you noted, Robert, many problems remain.

I can add to your woes: to create a footnote at an insertion point, you do the entirely expected

myInsertionPoint.footnotes.add()

But to insert an endnote, you do

myInsertionPoint.createEndnote()

The problem at one point was (not only with footnotes) that the engineer responsible for adding some scripting APIs didn't check how things were generally done in InDesign, but rather followed what they thought might make sense (it usually didn't). It's a sad reality that we have to live with.

Object of

Object of

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