Find path name

Question

Hello All,
I am new to photoshop scripting and i am learning. I want to write a code to "find the particular path with a alert box whether its is available in the file or not" i was trying and confused. i used "else" method but i couldn't get it right.
#target photoshop
var doc = app.activeDocument;
if (app.activeDocumen.pathItems.length > 0) {
app.activeDocument.pathItems[0].name = "Path 1"
} else {
    alert ("There is no path name: Path 1", title, errorIcon)
also tried this one
#target photoshop
var doc = app.activeDocument;
if ( doc.pathItems.length > 0 ) {
          app.activeDocument.pathItems.getByName('Path 1').select();
} else {
    alert ("There is no path name: Path 1", title, errorIcon)
pls help me!

Answer 1

A single if statement would not work for this task. Because pathItem.getByName will thorw an error if that pathItem does not exists you can not use getByName in an if statement. I know that some think try/catch sould not be used and here is a way to test for a path by name without the try/catch.
if( app.documents.length>0 && app.activeDocument.pathItems.length>0 ){
    for(var pathItemIndex = 0;pathItemIndex< app.activeDocument.pathItems.length; pathItemIndex++){
        if(app.activeDocument.pathItems[pathItemIndex].name == 'Path 1' ) {
            alert('Path found');
    alert('This document does not have a path with that name');
}else{
    alert('Needs a document with pathItems');
I used the try/catch because I think it is faster. With a try statement you need to have catch to handle the error or finally to run code regardles of an error. You can use both catch and finally if needed.
The e part of catch(e) is the error object. If you want more details about the error you could do something like this.
try{
    var myDoc = app.activeDocument;
    var myPath = myDoc.pathItems.getByName("Path 1");
    alert('The pathItem: '+myPath.name+' was found');
}catch(errorObject){
    alert(errorObject.message+': '+errorObject.line);
In this case the message would be the same if there is no document or pathItem with that name. But the line number is different. And most of the time the error message is more helpful than 'No such element'.
I hope that explains why the difference between using if or try/catch to do something like this. Let me know if you have more questions.