CS4 jsx app.place leaving object problem

Question

Hi,
I have a jsx script that I am developing for InDesign CS4. The script acquires an xml string, then after doing some manipulation on it, saves it to a UTF-8 file. After saving the file, the script does an app.place() using the file it saved. The file is brought onto the place brush and it works great up to that point. It places very nicely into the document, with a mouse click, after the snippet is imported. The problem is that after the place, when I try to save, via manually doing File --> Save, to an indd file, I get a message "Failure in saving. Object is invalid". Sometimes I receive more than one. If I try to close the tab and elect not to save instead , I receive the message(s) "Failed to purge records for ducument. Object is invalid".
If I reopen CS4 afterward and do a File -> Place and select the file saved by the script in the prior session, it not only places fine but then also allows me to save, cancel, etc. after the place; it works perfectly.
I'm pretty confused here. Is there some housekeeping I should be doing in the script after the place command or something?
Any help appreciated.
Thanks,
David

Answer 1

(idms? what's that?)
You shouldn't need to do any clean-up. As far as I can see, the preprocessing happens in Javascript, and all InDesign itself does is place the resulting file. Even the UTF8 part should not be a problem -- that is, Javascript has no problems at all with that, and InDesign should either reject it as a valid format, or read and place without parsing the UTF8 characters, or read and place entirely correct. (My limited experience with UTF8 in InDesign showing here ...)
As your Javascript creates a new file to be placed, you can try the following:
1. have your javascript preprocess the input and create the new file. Save that somewhere (but I assume the script already does that at present).
2. Quit InDesign. Yup -- let's make sure nothing remains in memory.
3. Restart InDesign, create a new blank file and import your processed file.
4. Try to save it.
Does that cause the same error? If so, it's #1. that causes some memory pollution, and you'll have to review your script. If not, your processed file may be malformed in some way that InDesign can't detect and can't handle. In that case, you should try to open it with a UTF8-aware text editor to make sure the UTF8 is okay.
If it is ... we'll have to think of something else.
[Ed.] I might as well add that the InDesign/Javascript interface is not as trustworthy as one may expect. I once tried reading in a data file of several MBs, and rather than a warning "Out of memory", InDesign simply crashed and burned. Whittling down the data file, one MB at a time, showed there was some upper limit which ID can handle, where above it would die without warning.