InDesign Javascript Hyperlink question

[Nick37129562ryen]

Hi Everyone,

Please can someone help, is there a way of checking if a word has a hyperlink to a Text Anchor attached to it? I've written a script to give me a list of all the words that have a certain character style. What I'm trying to do is check each word for a hyperlink.

I've been digging down on the properties of a word but as yet I've not found what I'm looking for.

Thanks

[Peter Kahrel]

You'd go about it like this:

1. Get the word's parent story and its index (i.e. its position in a story).

2. Get all hyperlinks, go through their sources until you get a source whose parent story and index coincide with those of your words.

[Nick37129562ryen]

Great! 👍

Thanks for the help Peter 🙂

I was hoping there might be a property of the word I could use.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

@Nick37129562ryen

There is a separate HyperlinkTextDestinations collection:

https://www.indesignjs.de/extendscriptAPI/indesign-latest/#HyperlinkTextDestinations.html

Hyperlink and Bookmark can have a TextDestination.

[Nick37129562ryen]

Thanks for the help Robert, much appreciated. I have plenty to look at now, thanks again.

[Nick37129562ryen]

Hi Peter,

Just another quick question on this subject...

This is a bit of a hack but, if I loop through all the words returned in the initial search and try and apply a hyperlink to each one, any that already have a hyperlink assigned will throw an error. I could then catch that and process accordingly.

Besides being a hack, are there any other flaws with this approach?

Thanks.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

Hi Peter,

Just another quick question on this subject...

This is a bit of a hack but, if I loop through all the words returned in the initial search and try and apply a hyperlink to each one, any that already have a hyperlink assigned will throw an error. I could then catch that and process accordingly.

Besides being a hack, are there any other flaws with this approach?

Thanks.

By @Nick37129562ryen

I wouldn't consider it a "hack" 😉

I'm not sure how easy it is to catch errors in the JavaScript - but, in VisualBasic - I use this approach all the time 😄

Make the code work like everything would work OK - but surround specific part in the "ignore errors" statements - then check if there was an error - and then react to the error.

Maybe it's just easier in VB?

[Nick37129562ryen]

Thanks for the help. I think it's pretty much the same in ExtendScript.

[m1b]

> ... any that already have a hyperlink assigned will throw an error

That's when I would use Text.findHyperlinks() and remove any found. No need for a try/catch.

- Mark

[Nick37129562ryen]

Thanks for the help Mark, I need to play around more with the Text.findHyperlinks(). I did try earlier but wasn't getting too far, then I remembered the trick of trying to apply a hyperlink. I've got that version working but, I think it'll be a worthwhile exercise trying your approach, think I'm using findHyperlinks() in the wrong way.

Thanks again.

[Vamitul - ks]

From my POV, using error handling as a control flow is an ugly antipattern. But I've been guilty of doing it myself plenty of times, so I won't judge. 

There is however another reason. A long long long time ago there was an in-depth analysis of how InDesign handles try-catch blocks (I think it was started by Jongware and continued by Marc, but it's been more than a decade ago so don't quote me on that). There's a lot more to it, but to simplify: when a `try` block is started, the entire application state is being snapshotted, and when an error occurs the state is being rolled back to the snapshot (or a sub-state of the snapshot, depending on the active `UndoModes`). It's not much of a problem in normal cases, but if you are dealing with large documents, large scripts, large state, etc, creating lots of snapshots can have quite a negative impact. If you are using `UndoModes.FAST_ENTIRE_SCRIPT`, it is even worse, as no intermediary states are saved, so you end up with some really crazy situations. 

[Nick37129562ryen]

Thanks for the info, much appreciated. I'll keep that in mind.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

@Vamitul - ks

In my case - I'm not working "inside" InDesign's environment - so all those problems do not apply to my tool 😉

[Vamitul - ks]

https://www.indesignjs.de/extendscriptAPI/indesign-latest/#Text.html#d1e461232__d1e468837

`text.findHyperlinks()` will return any hyperlinTextSource in it, but it can get slow.

[m1b]

Hi @Vamitul - ks that is my usual approach and I haven't noticed it being slow. Are you sure that the slowness wasn't caused by something else? @Peter Kahrel is that why you do the looping?

- Mark

[Vamitul - ks]

Behind the scenes, findHyperlinks is also looping through the hyperlink objects. It's closer to the machine because it issuing the internal db structure for it, but it's still a loop. 

Depending on the number of words that need to be checked, gathering all the hyperlink destinations and sources up front (more precisely, the `.sourceText` and `.destinationText` properties of them) and then checking if each of the words is part of the text can be a lot more effective. But testing if a Text object contains another Text object can be surprisingly complex (personally, I'd use resolved object specifiers for it). 

[m1b]

Interesting! For me so far, in all cases I've come across, it is just a matter of retrieving the hyperlink from—at most—a single paragraph, which is basically instant, of course. Thanks for your insight.

[Peter Kahrel]

When you have a reference to a word, you don't know whether it's a hyperlink text destination. So you'll have to process all hyperlinks and check whether your word is a HL text source and whether the HL's destination is an text anchor.

The same goes for text.findHyperlinks: it returns all hyperlinkTextSources, but then you have to iterate through them to check which one corresponds to your word.

[m1b]

Thanks @Peter Kahrel got it.

[Peter Kahrel]

The advantage of findHyperlinks() is that you can constrain the search to the word's parent story. When you start from hyperlinks you process the whole document.

[Nick37129562ryen]

Thank you for the help, it's much appreciated. I have a few avenues to explore now.

[Nick37129562ryen]

A big thank you to everyone for your help 🙂