InDesign CS5 and CS6 Scripting Changes/Incompatibilities

Question

I'm new to InDesign scripting and need to write a very complex Javascript for InDesign using the Toolkit. My concerns are if CS5/5.5 users will be able to run the script written for CS6. Are there known incompatibilities with the different releases? If so, where can I find a document to compare the differences. I will probably need to support both CS5 and CS6 (and anything in between), so a possibly solution may be to build for CS5, but if I do, will I be missing out on any key new features of CS6?

Answer 1

There are differences from 1 DOM version to another and they can and will break your script if you haven't designed it to handle them. For example:
If you want to use script labels like me (because they are awesome) the following will break if you use CS5 or later:
app.activeDocument.pageItems.item("myLabel").remove();
So you'd have to force the DOM to V6.0. But when doing so remember to revert back to the original version after you're done or you'll create bigger problems. This can be done like this:
app.scriptPreferences.version = 6.0; // CS4's DOM version
app.activeDocument.pageItems.item("myLabel").remove();
app.scriptPreferences.version = 10.2; // Current CC DOM version
This is very inconvenient (for me at least), so I wrap functions that require DOM changes with a custom version changer to handle this for me. In regards to a list of incompatibilities? Not sure, maybe someone here has one, I know Jongware has a website with all the DOM changes from 1 version to another. This can be found here:
Indesign JavaScript Help
Hope this helps.
Brett