Auto launch extension at application startup [InDesign]

[Manan Joshi]

Hi Guys,

In InDesign i want to autoload my panel at startup. I added the event com.adobe.csxs.events.ApplicationInitialized to StartOn tag in the manifest but its not working. Any suggestions on how to do this?

I even tried to write a extendscript with registering an idle task that makes the panel visible but that is also not working always

-Manan

[Trevor: · Accepted solution]

Try add

1) <Event>applicationActivate</Event>

2) Try disable the Start workspace. This I think is the key to the trouble

3) Invisible extension that shouldn't have trouble from 2) and can be called by 1) and call the non invisible (hidden) extension.

Not sure of any of the above but worth a shot

[Manan Joshi]

Thanks Trevorׅ points 1 and 2 did the trick. I suppose invisible extensions are not supported by InDesign.

-Manan

[Trevor:]

Glad you got it working, invisible extensions do work on InDesign.

I think point 2 is significant.

Harbs posted this on slack today

<UI>

    <Type>Custom</Type>

    <Menu></Menu>

    <Geometry>

        <Size>

            <Height>100</Height>

            <Width>100</Width>

        </Size>

    </Geometry>

</UI>

Comments

<Menu></Menu> Nothing between the tags

    <Geometry>

        <Size>

            <Height>100</Height> needs some number here, doesn't matter what (within reason)

            <Width>100</Width>

        </Size>

</Geometry>

[Trevor:]

More quotes from Harbs

Harbs  [16 hours ago] Prior to CC 2019, Lifecycle caused the invisible extension to launch without Menu and Geometry.

Harbs  [16 hours ago]

For some reason, in CC 2019 Menu and Geometry became required…

[Trevor:]

You can't believe the documentation.

The CEP first extension I make was an invisible one for InDesign and that was a few years back when they came out with CEP.

It could be there's some magical "invisible" extension type but the above method does the trick.

[Manan Joshi]

Oh goodness, so i was living under a rock believing that the documentation was a source of truth. Heavens knows how much outdated information i might have fed myself instead of testing it myself.

[Erin F.]

Hi Manan,

I reported that the chart was out of date back in February, and opened an issue on GitHub... just now I've added a pull request.

Do invisible panels work in InCopy? I'll ask Harbs directly if he's the only one who knows...

Best,

Erin F.

[Trevor:]

Hi Erin

I can't believe there's a difference InCopy is really closely related to InDesign and there's no reason there should be.

In fact all the apps should be able to handle "invisible" extensions they are just extensions which don't have any menu item or UI and have some event that starts them automatically.

So as long as the app can listen to an event listed in the manifest like app start, or document create then it will work.

Trevor

[Manan Joshi]

Hi Trevor,

I will try what Harbs has said in the chat, i was quoting it according to the CEP documentation. See the following

CEP-Resources/CEP 9.0 HTML Extension Cookbook.md at master · Adobe-CEP/CEP-Resources · GitHub

It specifically mentions no support for Invisible extensions in InDesign and InCopy

-Manan