C++ InDesign SDK | How to loading the defined lists?

[naradar7625500]

I am using C++ InDesign SDK for the plugin developments. Now I have a requirement to load we defined List in the InDesign from my plugin panel. So let me know the way of implementation for it. I have investigated it through the SDK document and I couldn't find any solution.

All these lists need to load from my plugin panel.

[HARSHIKA_VERMA]

Hi @naradar7625500,

Thank you for reaching out. I am checking your question with my InDesign team and will get back to you as soon as I hear any updates on your question.

I am also keeping the discussion open for our experts for any advice.

Thanks,

Harshika

[Manan Joshi]

Hi @naradar7625500,

If you want to create a new item to the list then the command to do that seems to be kCreateListStyleCmdBoss. However this looks like a dead end. This command has two interfaces namely

• IID_ILISTSTYLEINFO
• IID_ICOMMAND

For StyleInfo the implementation is mentioned as IPMUnknown, so we don't know what method to use to set up the params of the new list we are trying to create.

The second way to create the list is to load it from another InDesign document. In this case the command of interest could be kLoadListStylesCmdBoss, this seems to have all the defined interfaces, give it a try this should work. But it all depends upon whether you are in need of loading the lists from a document or not.

@HARSHIKA_VERMA while you are trying to get in touch with the InDesign team, could you please ask them why do we have such disparity in the SDK w.r.t. exposing capabilities to the 3rd party developers. They shared half the information and the other half was blocked so we can't do anything with this. If I can load the list from another InDesign document then why did the SDK designer think that it was not required to give me the capability to create a list myself and stopped me from doing so by not sharing a header file? This is the case at many points in the SDK, this is just one example.

-Manan

[Dirk Becker]

Initially I understood the problem to be how to populate the listbox or whatever widget is used in the particular case.

As Manan mentioned it, this is about missing interfaces. In my sources I have a comment that back with CS4 I tried IStyleInfo for IListStyleInfo (sometimes the same interfaces are reused with different IID) but in that case it did not work.

There is a developer prerelease program, and I'd recommend joining there for serious development. Occasionally it works to ask there to include specific interfaces to the SDK, in other cases not so much. Maybe Harshika can also achieve something similar.

Anyway, there is also the poor man's fallback via the scripting infrastructure. Thrill seeker create a script request and execute it via the script request handler - learning this from the SDK will take a few days of well spent developer time, that knowledge will also come handy if you intend to make your  plug-in scriptable.

Otherwise you can let a script do most of the work, there are examples in the forum how to invoke a script, pass arguments and results.