Change spot color and move to specific layer

per the scripting guide, this is the syntax for moving a group to a layer

tell application "Adobe Illustrator"

     set allPageItems to every page item of document 1

     move allPageItems to beginning of layer 1 of document 1

end tell

Ah.. I do believe that Sierra is the problem. Though i'm not sure whether anyone has definitively found a workaround yet. There's some speculation that you can go to the "Show Older Apps" dropdown menu in the Creative Cloud app? I'm not sure, and i can't test it because i very intentionally hold off on new OS updates for this very purpose. It seems more often than not, the updates cause more problems than they fix.

I do hope you get it fixed up though. Good luck. =)

You are very welcome. I owe everything i know to this forum, so passing that information on to others is an important piece of the puzzle for me.

Your syntax isn't off at all. all of those statements (except the move to lines) are spot on.

There are some things to note, however. Let's dive a little deeper. The app.executeMenuCommand() method behaves exactly as it does in the GUI. So you can test it out and see what happens. If you have nothing selected in the document, and then you attempt to use the GUI menus like so: Select > Same > Stroke Color you will see that nothing happens, and no error is reported. Knowing this, you always need to make sure that you have a selection before executing the menu command, otherwise nothing will happen and you won't know until you look at the file after the fact and see that nothing changed.

So that brings us to your question about selections. selection is a property of the document object and it manifests as an array of pageItems (pageItems include almost any element that you can see on the drawing area.. textFrames, pathItems, compoundPathItems, groupItems, etc.).

You can write your script to either accept the currently selected item(s) in the document, or better yet, you can begin with no selection, and have the script make the selections dynamically for you. (each of these has their pros and cons, but for the time being, we'll assume that you are working with files that have a predictable structure and the target items are reliably found where they should be.)

For reference, here's how you'd manipulate each item of the current selection (we're assuming plain old pathItems now, just simple shapes with no fancy stuff). Let's say we want to change the fillColor of each pathItem to a spot color called "Color 2" (this swatch must exist in your swatches panel already or you'll get an error).

function test()
{
    var docRef = app.activeDocument;
    var sel = docRef.selection; //this is an array of objects
    //this swatch must exist in your swatches panel before
    //executing the script. We can go over creating new
    //swatches later.
    var destSwatch = docRef.swatches["Color 2"];
    //lets loop the sel array and change the fill color of each
    //item to a spot color called "Color 2"
    for (var x = 0, len = sel.length; x < len; x++)
    {
        //here we update the fillColor property of
        //the current selected item
        //note that 'destSwatch' is an object,
        //so we need to acces its 'color' property
        sel.fillColor = destSwatch.color;
    }
}
test();

*quick note* You'll notice that any time i write some code, i wrap it in a container/wrapper/test function. This just helps to prevent any global variables from being saved in the environment and potentially contaminating some other script. This way, any variables created by the script are effectively destroyed at the end. Since Illustrator doesn't support later versions of ECMAScript and the constant let, we kind of have to fake it.

Now, assuming you want to make a selection from within your script. You'll first need to know the "address" of the item you want to select. The address is simply the path through the DOM tree. It is possible to access any object that is a child of the document object directly from the document object.. however, for now suffice it to say that it's generally a bad idea. I'll expound on this later. For the purposes of this test, let's assume we want to select all items on a given layer called "My Layer". For this, we'll do the same looping procedure as we did in the last test, but we'll be looping the "pageItems" array of the layer called "My Layer". Let's have a look:

function test()
{
    var docRef = app.activeDocument;
    var layers = docRef.layers;
    var swatches = docRef.swatches;
    var destSwatch = swatches["Color 2"];
    var myLayer = layers["My Layer"];
    //first let's clear out any existing selection so it doesn't
    //muddle up our results. When we're finished, we only want
    //certain items to be selected.
    docRef.selection = null;
    //now loop the pathItems on the layer called "My Layer"
    for (var x = 0, len = myLayer.pathItems.length; x < len; x++)
    {
        //set the current pathItems selected property to true
        myLayer.pathItems.selected = true;
    }
    //send an alert to the GUI letting the user know
    //how many items have been selected.
    //length is the property used to get the number
    //of elements in an array
    alert(docRef.selection.length);
    //get the selection array
    var sel = docRef.selection;
    //loop the selection array
    for(var x=0,len=sel.length;x<len;x++)
    {
        //change the fillColor of the current pathItem
        sel.fillColor = destSwatch.color;
    }
}
test();

Hope this helps. =)

PS. another really important resource for you to checkout is the OMV (or Object Model Viewer) that comes baked into the ExtendScript Toolkit. I assume you're using the ESTK to execute these test scripts. If you're not, you should. It gives you tons of development and debugging tools. You can access the OMV from ESTK with "CMD + /" or through the Help menu. the OMV lets you search or browse through all of the different objects in the DOM as well as their properties and methods.