App drop-down properties causes crash!

Hi Carlos, thanks guys. Yeah I've used sublime 2 & 3 and it's cool. I think these programmes are more for the experts, and not really helpful for the beginners. Autocomplete is cool, but you need to have an idea of what commands do what, where the object browser really is handy; it lets absolute noobs like me get an idea of what's what. I find Sublime lacks a decent way importing images, there's a plugin that completes the path name but I've found it a bit sketchy. If I'm doing a site with a lot of images I find Dreamweaver to be very helpful.

OffTopic, you're completely right, I've yet to find an app with a proper manual.

I really liked VBA and I'm in Excel a lot. I know Microsoft have moved towards Javascript too and I wonder how that will be in excel.

Thanks for your input guys, and your recommendation of Atom.

CarlosCanto​ I could make an AI-specific autocomplete extension for Atom if you'd be interested. I have a limited Illustrator-DOM autocomplete for one of my debugging panels already but I'd rather rebuild that one than have others use it as is -- it has a few Windows-specific options (for hotkeys within the editor) so it may not work on mac.

Dalski K​, when I first came to these forums and was complaining about ESTK and the JS Scripting Reference because I thought it was hard to get started, Silly-V said something along the lines of this forum and community being "the real documentation". I've found that remark is definitely accurate because I've learned far more with a google search leading to forum posts than I ever have trying to use ESTK's OMV or the Scripting Guide/Reference. I think a critical part of learning is turnover rate, though, and using Atom for scripting instead of ESTK made it far more comfortable for me personally to start. You don't actually need ESTK to write scripts at all, you can do it through Atom using an extension called Process Palette:

I found it through a CreativeCow answer. So I'd argue there's no real advantage to using ESTK over a modern text editor with exception to accessing the console and the OMV (and I'd imagine the Data Browser as well if it weren't broken for me), but seemingly a lot of disadvantages that come with ESTK over modern text editors because it lacks so many features that others have by default -- multi-cursor, third-party apps, robust syntax highlighting, continued support, dynamic keybindings, etc. You can create your own console / IDE as a panel inside AI, even one that runs scripts and code with a hotkey and retains all of ESTK's error warnings:

I mostly use it as a helper function to debug other panels and scripts while writing them within Atom, to bypass the lack of having access to ESTK's console:

I've seen another more robust version of this created by Trevor here. You can also use PlayWrite the same way when writing a completely external script, but you'd need the required function to send a CSXSEvent within the script you're using:

// Rewrites the console line / title
JSXEvent('data here', 'com.playwrite.console')
// Rewrites the editor contents
JSXEvent('data here', 'com.playwrite.rewrite')
// Adds data as next line in editor
JSXEvent('data here', 'com.playwrite.write')
function JSXEvent(payload, eventType) {
  try {
    var xLib = new ExternalObject("lib:\PlugPlugExternalObject");
  } catch (e) {
    JSXEvent(e, 'console')
  }
  if (xLib) {
  var eventObj = new CSXSEvent();
  eventObj.type = eventType;
  eventObj.data = payload;
  eventObj.dispatch();
  }
  return;
}
// ...Or having this in your code allows you to write console.log() and display to this panel as if in normal JS
console.log(someVariable)
var console = {
  log : function(data) {JSXEvent(data, 'com.playwrite.console')}
};

Thanks Off Topic, glad to hear I'm not the only one experiencing this.

This happens to me as well. ESTK is hardly usable for me with exception to the OMV (which itself is pretty obtuse and hard to navigate, and doesn't display useful information like what parameter values should be) because of this glitch -- I see this list in the Data Browser tab, but when I click to uncollapse anything the menu just refreshes. It sends me to the top and I scroll down but nothing is uncollapsed -- it really defeats the purpose of having a Data Browser tab or this in list form.

I know, I had to learn VBA because I use it a lot with spreadsheet automation so I had to learn that first. Which has given me the basic understanding of an object oriented language (I know VBAs not fully oo'd but more or less for my basic learning).

I've fumbled around with JS a little before but I know very little. Thanks I downloaded all guides prior to this post and have had a quick look, doesn't seem very detailed but then again I suppose that's just pointing the basics and there's plenty of other resources out there for JS.

I must say first looks for JS aren't great, not even able to display the data browser lol.

Thanks again.

Thanks William, yes it doesn't seem great at all.

The info I was seeking was all document properties etc... to learn the language I wanted to quickly see all what was currently available in the current document.

Like VBA setting a variable to be the current worksheet & then using the locals window to see what is available is what helped me learn VBA.

Regards

Thanks William,

I'm not running a script, atm, it just usually will not provide me with info on the app i.e. selecting the drop down on app illustrator. Sometimes it will work but the majority of time it will not. I just got it to work on a file that was suprisingly big, yet on a clean minimal new file it didn't provide info.

Again to clarify this is nothing to do with the script, this is just merely seeing what properties are available in the current Illustrator app/ document.

It takes about a minute, as pictured it states pending in the data browser and just doesn't provide any further info. It doesn't actually crash, it just doesn't provide the info.

There's a blue spinning wheel in the ExtendScript App.

Illustrator itself pauses and becomes unresponsive. Sometimes if I wait it will become responsive again, other times it will not.

Regards

so what's going on in the background when you notice this issue? is the script in the middle of executing? is the script paused at a breakpoint? was there a runtime error?

What is your script going to do when you're finished? In other words, what kind of processing is happening to the file when you notice this issue?