How to loop over EVERYTHING in Layers panel?

[ariffjeff]

I need to iteratively loop over absolutely everything in the Layers panel IN ORDER, including layers/sublayers themselves, in order to increment a variable. This loop should stop incrementing once it reaches the index of a desired pageItem.

I've tried the following but it implicitly skips over layers because pageItems don't inlcude layers:

var targetItem == selection[0]

var i = 0
while(true) {
if(activeDocument.pageItems[i] == targetItem) return i
i++
}

Like I said above, I need to loop over everything in order, so I can't just check for layers in the middle of the loop with code like the following:

activeDocument.layers[i]

I can't think of a way to write this solution.

Is there a way to write my code that can simply iterate over everything in one go without having to do spaghetti code checking and all sorts?

[Silly-V]

This sounds tough, I am not sure whether it's possible to do this as we can't tell if a sub-layer goes after or before any items.

One possibility would be going through Document.pageItems can let you traverse upwards from each item by using the .parent property which could be a group or a layer, all the way up to the document object. By itself it's useless for your cause, until you consider that the linear document pageItems collection is sequential so you can at least see of this one rectangle whose parent is a layer is below or above another pageItem and that other item's parent is a layer which is the same parent of the rectangle's parent layer. So now you can sort of see the order of the sub-layer inside the parent layer.
With the new versions of illustrator allowing us to get a page item's uuid property, gathering this kind of tree is made easier and speeds up the work. You may have to run a couple document iterations, but the rest can then be done with your own custom objects in memory. Iterating through document pageItems is slow, so it's always best to get the pageItem's properties such as the parent container type and typename as well as that uuid. First, gather all uuids from Document.pageItems to build a sequential list of all items. Second, run a recursive loop from the document-down to create a tree which has all the art, but the layers are in a special place out of order. This tree has all the items and groups in the proper stacking order except for layers which would be not inside the Layer.pageItems property but inside the Layer.layers property, so a different loop would have to be included to also get the child layers and their pageItems and so on. So now you'll have a sequential list and your gathered tree which has the sub-layers out of order. Next you run a function to re-order the contained sub-layers in every layer node into their proper place by comparing the uuids of certain pageItems inside the layers to know that a certain sub-layer is supposed to be actually below a certain pageItem.

[CarlosCanto]

he said he didn't want spaghetti 🙂

[Silly-V]

The problem is solved: simply place each spaghetti noodle into its own ziploc baggie. It's the best way of dealing with my code, food, family, etc. Follow me for more tips!

[femkeblanco]

Please excuse my naivety, but doesn't this go thru pageItems in order of layers?

var printOut = "";
var items = app.activeDocument.pageItems;
var iterateLayers = function (_layers) {
  for (var i = 0; i < _layers.length; i++) {
    printOut = printOut + _layers[i].name + "\r";
    for (var j = 0; j < items.length; j++) {
      if (items[j].parent == _layers[i]) {
        printOut = printOut + items[j].name + "\r";
      }
    }  
    iterateLayers(_layers[i].layers);
  }
}
iterateLayers(app.activeDocument.layers);
alert( printOut );

[Silly-V]

Because there can be sub-layers in any position among the surrounding pageItems, it's tricky to assign a pageItem-like index to all the items including treating a layer object similar to a group object. As I understand, OP wants to say the sub-layer is item x in the layer 1 and the rectangle is item y in the layer 1.

[femkeblanco]

Gotchya.  Thanks. 

[CarlosCanto]

I played with it a couple of years ago, I got busy and never finished the project...but the way I approached my spaghetti was to first add a dummy item to all empty sub layers. Then I could loop though every pageItem and be able to tell where every sublayer was.

But that was before absoluteZOrderPosition existed, it made things a lot easier.