🚀 go-pugleaf

Gang--

Scripting the creation of index topics with subtopics can be a real brain-twister. When you look at the InDesign CS object model, you'll see that the index object has a topics collection, and that you can tell the index to add a topic:



//given an index "myIndex" 
var myTopic = myIndex.topics.add("Mammals");

So far, so good. Next, we can see that topics include a subtopics collection, and that we can add a subtopic as follows:

var mySubtopic = myTopic.subtopics.add("Bats");

The subtopic "Bats" shows up on the "Mammals" topic, just as one would expect. Let's say we want to add a further subtopic--now things get confusing (at least for me). Here's what doesn't work:

var myTopic = myIndex.topics.add("Mammals"); 
var mySubtopic = myTopic.subtopics.add("Bats"); 
var mySubSubTopic = myTopic.subtopics.add("Vampire");

The above script produces the index topics "Mammals, Bats," and "Mammals, Vampire," when what we wanted was "Mammals, Bats, Vampire." It took me (and Stan Somers, another Adobe guy) a while to figure out the right approach (Stan's the one who really got it to work). Here it is:

var myTopic = myIndex.topics.add("Mammals"); 
var mySubtopic = myTopic.subtopics.add("Bats"); 
var mySubSubTopic = mySubtopic.parent.subtopics.add("Vampire");

What the...? Aren't myTopic and mySubtopic.parent the same object? As it turns out, they're not. When you tell myTopic to create mySubtopic, what you're really doing is creating *another topic*. It's that topic, not myTopic, that you want to have create the subtopic.

Hope this helps any poor soul who's been trying to create index topics via scripting!

Thanks,

Ole