• Adobe After Effects Expressions

  Extendscript How Tos

  Posted by Billy Sides on May 1, 2014 at 9:52 pm

  For my first how to:

  I’m creating a text layer, then I want to rename that layer…but I can’t for the life of me figure out what the correct code should be.

  Here’s what I have:
  
app.project.activeItem.layers.addText("dog");
app.project.activeItem.layer(1).text.name("cat");


  The reason I want to rename it is because I want to search based off of the layer name, not the source name…or maybe you can do it in one line???

  Thanks for your help.

  -bsides

  Billy Sides replied 12 years ago 2 Members · 4 Replies
• 4 Replies

• 

  Dan Ebberts

  May 1, 2014 at 11:03 pm

  Just change your second line to this:

  app.project.activeItem.layer(1).name = “cat”;

  Even better would be to put the new layer object in a variable:

  var myTextLayer = app.project.activeItem.layers.addText(“dog”);
  myTextLayer.name = “cat”;

  Dan
• 

  Billy Sides

  May 2, 2014 at 5:51 am

  Thanks Dan!

  Ok here’s my next issue:

  I want to increment a variable each time a button is clicked and set its value to 0. My brain says this will work…but nope.

  
function onButtonClick()
{
i++;
var newVariable[i] = 0;
}


  I’ve tried several variants of this with no luck.
  Any help is appreciated.

  Thanks!

  -bsides
• 

  Dan Ebberts

  May 2, 2014 at 6:05 am

  I’m not sure exactly what you’re trying to do, but variable i would have to be defined outside the scope of the function (i.e. as a global variable) for the value to persist from one click to the next.

  Dan
• 

  Billy Sides

  May 2, 2014 at 8:13 am

  Yup it is, this is just the function called when I click a button.

  Basically what I’m trying to accomplish is setting the text layers base value as 0, but each time it has to have a unique variable so I can change it later. Or I can just call to get the texts value, but from what I’ve read it doesn’t just return the string. Thought maybe there was an easier way.

  -bsides

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