Searching in a Treeview (scripting)

[Mitch Mann]

Check out “Script UI for Dummies” for a way to do a search in a list box

https://www.kahrel.plus.com/indesign/scriptui-2-0.pdf

It might inspire a solution, but I don’t think it specifically addresses a search in a tree view. Let us know if you figure out a way to do it, I’d be interested in knowing!

[Neil Redman]

Hey, thanks for the link, I already found that document and had found out a way how to do it. The main idea behind it was to have a function call itself. It is similar to what they do on page 45 of the document when they are expanding all the nodes in a treeview. I pushed all the elements to an array and then simply searched the array.
To search the array I used indexOf which is by default not enabled in After Effects Scripting because it uses an older JavaScript version. On this site (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Array/indexOf) they give you some code, that you can add to your script to enable the indexOf method of arrays.
This is the code I used to push the treeview items to the array:
(Tree is the name of my Treeview and names the array)

function Names() {
names=[];
for (var i = 0; i < Tree.items.length; i++)
{names.push(Tree.items[i].text)}
for (var i = 0; i < Tree.children.length; i++)
{getNames (Tree.children[i]);}

function getNames (node) {
var kids = node.items;
try{
for (var i = 0; i < kids.length; i++){
names.push(kids[i].text)
if (kids[i].type == “node”) getNames (kids[i])};
}
catch(err){}
}

I had to add “try” and “catch” to the code, because it appears to produce errors when they are no items left. Hope this helps 😉

[Mitch Mann]

Cool! Makes me think of building a media browser for AE, like premiere has. What are you using tree view search for?