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I'm growing increasingly fond of invoking XSLT from FrameMaker Extendscript. I can now consolidate formerly multi-tool, multi-step workflows into a single Extendscript.
But ... in scripts for distribution to others, I don't know where to put the XSLT file. FrameMaker wants a fully-qualified path for the XSLT stylesheet. My AppData folder seems right for "me", but the path will vary with the user. And without a fully-qualified path, FrameMaker looks for the XSLT stylesheet in the FrameMaker application folder -- not really an option because of Windows filesystem protections.
I don't want to tell my customers to "edit the Extendscript to point to your copy of the XSLT stylesheet". I could set the location in a config file, but even that doesn't seem optimal. How have others handled this issue?
-Alan
--
Alan Houser
Group Wellesley, Inc.
Consultant and Trainer, Technical Publishing
arh on Twitter
412-450-0532
Hi Alan,
You can refer to the user's AppData folder like this:
$.getenv ('AppData');
On my system that gives me the path of the User's AppData/Roaming folder.
~Ian
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Hi Alan,
You can refer to the user's AppData folder like this:
$.getenv ('AppData');
On my system that gives me the path of the User's AppData/Roaming folder.
~Ian
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Ian,
Thank you! I should have asked if the standard FrameMaker environment variables are available in Extendscript. You've answered my question!
-Alan
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Pleased to help. There's another way which may work, but I've had problems with previously...
When you use ExtendScript's File or Folder objects you can use a tilde to indicate the user's home directory like this:
~/MyAppFolder/ which, on my system, would map to C:\Users\Ian\MyAppFolder\
Ian
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Alan,
you can also use properties of FrameMaker session object (app)
CurrentDir
BinDir
TmpDir
HomeDir
InitDir
SGMLDir
StructureDir
XmlDir
HelpDir
UserSettingsDir
UserHomeDir
UserHomeDir points to %appdata%/Adobe/FrameMaker/[version]
Not sure about UserSettingsDir, but I'm sure you'll find out
Hope this helps.
Markus
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Thanks Ian,
wasn't Aware of that $.getenv function.
Will save me some time in future 🙂
Markus
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All of my code - Extendscript binaries, support files, XSL, etc are always placed in the user's AppData space. The main reason is that I have very quickly become bored with paranoid IT staff when asked to install some very useful timesaving scripts for their documentation people. That simply never worked. The user's AppData space belongs to the user and with today's enormous hard drives there is not really a valid reason not to replicate the code into each user's AppData space - as long as your code contains a command that allows easy updating from some network location.