Is it possible to get unique links paths with JavaScript?

[Simon S.]

Hi people,

I'm trying to write a simple script to quickly generate a list of the links paths of an InDesign document.

Here's my piece of code :

var myLinksPath = app.activeDocument.links.everyItem().filePath;

var myNewDoc = app.documents.add();

var myTextFrame = myNewDoc.textFrames.add({
	geometricBounds: myNewDoc.pages[0].bounds
});

myTextFrame.contents = myLinksPath.join("\r");

While this works perfectly fine, it gets all the occurences of any link, which is not really necessary. Is there a way to only deal with unique links (not sure if they are called this way in english, see the attached image below in french — 41 unique links for 78 total links)? I see that links have an "assetURL" property but I'm not sure I can do something with that. Thank you for any advice.

[Mike Bro · Accepted solution]

Hello,

you can remove the duplicate occurences like this.......

var myLinksPath = app.activeDocument.links.everyItem().filePath;

var RemoveDuplicates = myLinksPath; 
var myCleanList = []; 
var count = 0;   
var start = false; 
 
for (j = 0; j < RemoveDuplicates.length; j++) { 
 for (k = 0; k < myCleanList.length; k++) { 
   if (RemoveDuplicates[j] == myCleanList[k] ) { 
       start = true; 
       } 
   } 
   count++; 
   if (count == 1 && start == false) { 
    myCleanList.push(RemoveDuplicates[j]); 
   } 
   start = false; 
   count = 0; 
} 

var myUniqueLinks = myCleanList;

var myNewDoc = app.documents.add();

var myTextFrame = myNewDoc.textFrames.add({
	geometricBounds: myNewDoc.pages[0].bounds
});

myTextFrame.contents = myUniqueLinks.join("\r");

Regards,

Mike

[Simon S.]

Hi Mike, sure I thought about removing the duplicates, my point was about knowing if I was missing something more straightforward instead of having to loop through every single link.

Still, thank you a lot for your answer, your sample does a great job. I'll try to understand how it works, this is gonna be instructive for me.

[Mike Bro]

Hello Simon,

re: I thought about removing the duplicates, my point was about knowing if I was missing something more straightforward instead of having to loop through every single link.

I would imagine that's exactly what's happening in the background of the application in order to display the total number of links and the number of unique links.

Regards,

Mike

[rob day]

You can also make a duplicate removal function—this is just a variation of mike’s code:

var myLinksPath = removeDuplicates(app.activeDocument.links.everyItem().filePath);
$.writeln(myLinksPath.length)




/**
* Removes duplicates from the array
* @Param an array to edit 
* @Return an array with no duplicates 
* https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign/js-how-to-remove-duplicate-items-from-an-array/td-p/3044978
*/
function removeDuplicates(a){
    var ra = new Array();
    var o = new Object()
    for( i=0 ; i<a.length ; ++i ){
        o[a[i]] = null;
    }
    for( a[i] in o ){
        ra.push(a[i]);
    }
    return ra;
}

[Simon S.]

Hi Rob, that's some interesting stuff, thank you.

[Peter Kahrel]

And yet another approach: a variant of Rob's script adds items to an array only if they're not already in the array:

myLinksPath = app.activeDocument.links.everyItem().filePath;
list = [];
known = {};

for (i = 0; i < myLinksPath.length; i++) {
  if (!known[myLinksPath[i]]) {
    list.push (myLinksPath[i]);
    known[myLinksPath[i]] = true;
  }
}

P.

[Simon S.]

Hi Peter, thank you for this addition too!