: Why does grouping or moving textboxes break the script? I am a beginner at writing scripts for InDesign (just started today!). I have somehow managed to write a script which auto-fills a text

@Cody3331749

Where does your items name "linkslist" come from? By setting a name for the textFrame?

The "name" property of a textframe seems to be persistent for the document. Also if you copy paste the textframe to another doc it still is there.

But if you have a page with 2 textframes and you run:

$.writeln(app.activeDocument.pages[0].textFrames.length);


it will return 2

Group these textframes together and it will return 0

If you want to access elements that are grouped you need to access them like this:

$.writeln (app.activeDocument.pages[0].groups[0].textFrames[0].name)


You also can access them this way:

$.writeln(app.activeDocument.pages[0].allPageItems.length)


This will return 3.

if you run:

for(var i = 0; i < app.activeDocument.pages[0].allPageItems.length; i++){
$.writeln(app.activeDocument.pages[0].allPageItems[i].constructor.name)
}


The output will be:

Group
TextFrame
TextFrame


So you could create a check for your name and access that particular textFrame again.

(Tested in ID CC 2014 on OSX 10.10.2)

Update:

To retrieve the textframe with the name "linkslist" you should do something like this:

function get_linklist(page) {
var tf = null;
for (var i = 0; i < page.allPageItems.length; i++) {
var item = page.allPageItems[i];
if (item.name == "linkslist") {
tf = item;
break;
}
}
return tf;
}

var doc = app.activeDocument;
var p = doc.pages[0];

var res = get_linklist(p);
if (res === null) {
$.writeln(" :(");
} else {
$.writeln(" :)");
}

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