QuickTip: Find Object Properties Quickly

Finding properties in OMV (Object Model Viewer) can be really painful, and slow. Personally, my best friend when writing scripts is Theunis de Jongs (aka Jongware) InDesign JavaScript Reference Guide but also trying to remember connections between objects and when to use which property, class, method… But, there is also another way to find out what properties you can use, and it’s already built in. Key is in Object reflection! So, let’s take a look how to put it in use! 🙂

For example, we want to get all properties available for Application Object. We can retrieve them very easily with reflect property: (Properties are returned in Array)

var myAppProperties = app.reflect.properties;

// display results
alert(myAppProperties);

Great, but, what is so great about this?! As we know, JavaScript is Case-sensitive language, so myProperty != myproperty 🙂 so we can check have we typed property with correct case!

Further more, by combining this method with Scrollable alert by Peter Kahrel we get very great tool! Here is one example:

// Scrollable alert function
function alert_scroll (title, input){
   if (input instanceof Array)
       input = input.join ("\r");
   var w = new Window ("dialog", title);
   var list = w.add ("edittext", undefined, input, {multiline: true, scrolling: true});
   list.maximumSize.height = w.maximumSize.height-100;
   list.minimumSize.width = 250;
   w.add ("button", undefined, "Close", {name: "ok"});
   w.show ();
}

// object
var reflectProperties = app.colorSettings;

// display properties
alert_scroll("Object properties", reflectProperties.reflect.properties.sort());

I also sorted properties by adding simple sort() at the end.

That’s it!

Happy coding! 😀