Checkbox Control failing

[Steve Bentley]

It seems it’s not just a checkbox issue.
If I make a new solid on the inner comp and link its opacity, say, to a layer in the outer comp, when I close out the pick whipped expression, AE tells me there is no such layer named for the one I just picked and disables the new expression.
I could begrudgingly accept this if all the other expressions that are currently running in the inner comp using data accessed from the outer weren’t working, and the entire cross comp expression routine was failing, but the Checkbox test and this new routine are the only ones that fail – all others, and there are a lot of them, are working fine.
Have I hit a high water mark?

Cheers,
SB

[Filip Vandueren]

hi Steve,

I’m not behind an AE station right now, but could you check if adding .value after the pickwhip for that checkbox returns a better result.
Sometimes you need to add that because otherwise the expression could be interpreted as “does the checkbox object exist?” instead of “is it checked?”

I’m not very sure I understand what’s happening in your second post, I’ll do some tests when I get home.

[Filip Vandueren]

I’ve tested and can confirm:

say you add this to the sourceText of a textlayer:

comp("Comp 2").layer("Null 1").effect("Checkbox Control")("Checkbox")

you get 1 or 0 depending on the checked state because javascript is correctly ‘casting’ the checkbox-object into a string containing it’s value. (the sourcetext expects a string)

BUT !


if (comp("Comp 2").layer("Null 1").effect("Checkbox Control")("Checkbox")) {
1
} else {
0
}

always returns 1.
The checkbox-object is cast to a logical value (“if” expects a true or false).
In this case: true: the checkbox object exists.

These WILL all work as expected however:

if (comp(“Comp 2”).layer(“Null 1”).effect(“Checkbox Control”)(“Checkbox”).value)

if (comp(“Comp 2”).layer(“Null 1”).effect(“Checkbox Control”)(“Checkbox”)==1)

if (comp(“Comp 2”).layer(“Null 1”).effect(“Checkbox Control”)(“Checkbox”)==true)

the last one is puzzling though: we don’t explicitly ask for the “value” of the object, so javascript again casts it to a logical value true/false, and it does work in this case…

So I do consider this a bug.

[Steve Bentley]

I had tried those as well – as a matter of course I’m usually a “==true” kind of guy anyway, and never testing for the string of 1.
However this morning I have gone back to an older version of our project and it does seem to work there(== true). So either all the extra code I have added since(and there is a lot) has taken AE over a high water mark or the comp is simply corrupt – just the comp not the project.

Attempting it with the same inner comp and a new outer comp works just fine. I have tried replacing the layer in the bad outer comp with a new one and a new checkbox, still no joy. It’s interesting that my corruption is also returning a “1”, as well.

Thanks for the response.

Cheers,
Steve B

[Filip Vandueren]

what does the .value method return when you put it on a Text-layer to debug ?

try .toString() too, that should return: [object Property]

[Lloyd Alvarez]

>>So I do consider this a bug.

Hey Filip (and everyone else),

I hope you file bugs with Adobe when you find them. This is the only way to make sure they are aware of them and queue them to be fixed. You can file bugs (and feature requests) here:

<https://www.adobe.com/go/wish>

-Lloyd

[Rob Nairn]

Hi all,
The info here in this thread has almost got me over the line for a project I’m working on. I want to create different versions of comp using a check box that turn on or off different layers. The only problem is those layers already have opacity keyframes:
So when their turned off this expression works a treat, when their turned on I want (for instance) the else part of the statement to return the values that are already keyframed.

This is what I got so far:
if (comp(“KT81109_cave monsterW2 OL”).layer(“Null 1”).effect(“NZ toggle -NZ if on”)(“Checkbox”)==true) {
o
} else {
100
}
I want to replace the ‘100’ with something that will allow a fade to occur.

Thanks in advance for any help you might be able to give.

Cheers!

[Lloyd Alvarez]

Just replace the 100 with value like this:

if (comp(“KT81109_cave monsterW2 OL”).layer(“Null 1”).effect(“NZ toggle -NZ if on”)(“Checkbox”)==true) {
0
} else {
value
}

-Lloyd

https://aescripts.com

[Rob Nairn]

Thats sensational! Thanks for the help.

Cheers.