Exploring OnOpen eventhandling.

[Dave_Saunders]

A discussion in another topic has me looking into event-driven scripts. I started simple with this:

#target indesign
#targetengine 'dave'
(function(){
          var myEventListener = app.eventListeners.add("afterOpen", testFunction, false);
          function testFunction() {
                    $.writeln("Count of open documents: " + app.documents.length);
          }
}())

I saved this in the InDesign CC/Scripts/startup scripts folder under the name OpenHandler.jsx and restarted InDesign. Then I created a new empty document and in the ESTK JavaScript Console, I see:

Count of open documents: 1

So, so far so good. But my suspicion is that at this point in the document opening process, there is not yet a window to work with. Easy enough to check ...

#target indesign
#targetengine 'dave'
(function(){
          var myEventListener = app.eventListeners.add("afterOpen", testFunction, false);
          function testFunction() {
                    $.writeln("Count of open documents: " + app.documents.length);
                    $.writeln("Count of windows: " + app.windows.length);
          }
}())

And I'm wrong, there is a window:

Count of open documents: 1
Count of windows: 1

And I got this same result with and without the Application Frame active (relevant only on Mac).

So, the question is, can I force the window to be a particular size? I'll reply to that in the comments.

[Dave_Saunders]

What do you know, this works:

#target indesign
#targetengine 'dave'
(function(){
          var myEventListener = app.eventListeners.add("afterOpen", testFunction, false);
          function testFunction() {
                    app.layoutWindows[0].bounds = [50, 32, 1143, 944];
          }
}())

Dave

[DBLjan]

Hello Dave,

This. Is. Awesome!

Really, i was using your script for this every day a couple of times, i keybinded it and was quite happy. Then at work with not much work at hand I revisited an eventhandling-thingy (applying metadata before saving), getting to know the different eventhandlers, and tried to clip your window-resizing-script together with afterOpen – but i'm not a (JS-)programmer, fiddled around, got frustrated.

It was time to ask the comm: Bumping your 2009-thread (never thought you would help me out there) with the idea that i had to bind this on opening documents – and bam! – you nailed it!

It got my bounds out of the .txt of your (old) script, and now my workflow purrs like a kitten…meaning its so pleasing not to keypress for every new open doc.

Chapeu!

…and when you decide to merge your fresh eventhandling-skills together with the file-reading-bounds-checking-script, let me know. But as it is, its perfect, because I only hab one bound-setting for my windows.

[Guest]

This probably falls under the heading of if-ain't broke-who-cares, but I learned the hard way that the afterOpen event can fire twice. If the user double-clicks on a document when InDesign isn't running, the application launches, which triggers an afterOpen event. Then the document opens, which triggers another. So my afterOpen handlers look like this:

function doThisWhenDocOpens(myEvent) {

     if (myEvent.target.constructor.name == "LayoutWindow") {

          // do your thing here

     }

}

It's kind of educational to use $.writeln() to print the target.constructor.name to the ESTK console, for this an other event listeners.