How to show and hide standard InDesign panels through scripting?

Question

I’m able to get a reference to, for instance, the “Scripts” panel; but it doesn’t seem to have the show and hide methods like panels created through scripting (see code below). How can I get it to show or hide programmatically, without invoking the corresponding menu item?

function findPanelByName(name) { // String → Panel|null
    for (var iPanel = 0; iPanel < app.panels.length; iPanel++) {
        var panel = app.panels[iPanel];
        if (panel.name == name) {
            return panel;
        }
    }
    return null;
}

var scriptsPanel = findPanelByName('Scripts');

scriptsPanel.show(); // → “scriptsPanel.show is not a function”

Answer 1

A few things: Your method to get the right panel is unneccessarily complicated. You could just get the panel by using the panel collection's item method like so:

var scriptsPanel = app.panels.item('Scripts');

Then, you don't need to use show() to show the panel (as that method does not exist), but you can just show the panel, by settings its visible property to true:

scriptsPanel.visible = true;

And lastly, in case anybody else is supposed to use the script, you should make sure, that it works with international versions of InDesign as well. In my German version, the above panel for example would not exist, as it is named Skripte instead of Scripts. To avoid that you can use the language independent key of InDesign:

var scriptsPanel = app.panels.item('$ID/Scripting');

So, in conclusion, the entire script could be shortened up to this one-liner

app.panels.item('$ID/Scripting').visible = true;