Modal Dialogs in Automation plugin?

I seem to be unable to get my dialog window into a modal state when it's called as part of an Automation plugin on Windows. I've been using the very same code (wxWidgets based) from an Export plugin, and everything works fine there. Also on Mac everything is well.
However, running that dialog from an Automation plugin, I can still interact with document windows behind my dialog. The dialog is always front, but not always the active window.
Does anyone have any clues how event handling is different for Automation plugins, or how I could work around this?

HI, I want create a dialog as your "wrong state", which i can still interact with the document when it show.
How you create this dialog? Can you give me your code ?
My hotmail is: [email protected]
Thanks.

Similar Messages

Plugin fails to display modal dialog with ActiveX'ed bean

I have first posted this in the ActiveX bridge group, and have gotten no response. Since the plugin group also has posts on modal dialogs, thought this is also correct to post here. Both plugin and ActiveX'ed beans use beans.ocx for display.
I have a bean wrapped as ActiveX with sun.beans.ole.Packager. The bean provides a method, which ultimately will pop up a modal confirm dialog (JOptionPane.showConfirmDialog(.)).
If the method is triggered solely from within the bean, say via a click on a bean's button, all is well.
If the method is triggered from its host (VB form), the
- the call is done on the main thread. The confirm dialog shows, but when I click on one of its buttons, the app hangs.
- If I try to pass the call into the event dispatch thread (SwingUtilities.invokeAndWait(.)), the confirm dialog somewhat pops up, but does not paint completely and the app hangs.
- If I try to pass the call into the event dispatch thread with SwingUtilities.invokeLater(.) all is well, the confirm dialog pops up, I can click on its buttons, etc. but the function returns to VB too early, which is not what I want since I need the answer.
- I have tried the following:
entry method determines it is not on the event dispatch thread.
Tries itself with invokeLater(.), yields the current thread and calls wait(.).
The method invoked later will execute in the event dispatch thread, popup the confirm dialog and when finished will do a notifyAll(.).
Unfortunately, what happens is that the entry thread (the main thread) puts the invokeLater into the event dispatch queue, yields itself and wait()'s. And waits and waits. In the meantime, the dispatch thread will get to the point where it wants to show the confirm dialog, but will then hang. If I time out the wait in the main thread, then the confirm dialog is popped up immediately after the wait finishes with the time-out.
Sooo, this tells me that there is some strange synchronization going on which causes something like a deadlock. Is there any good approach to triggering modal dialogs from a native app hosting the ActiveX'ed bean??
I have found many entries on probs with modal dialogs in the plug-in, which relate to applets. But no solution yet.
Some keywords that I have came across are:
- the event dispatch queue can be flushed and "empty events" can be posted into it. Also, the invokeAndWait(.) will register a "conditional" message pump on the event queue that seems to work until the locking condition is no longer valid. Any experience with these? Any way to manipulate (a) main thread, (b) event dispatch queue, (c) event dispatch thread to resolve the apparent deadlock?
- There seems to be some difference in locking when the parent process is VB/COM as when it is Java. I have the impression that the main thread has some lock until the call made from VB/COM is fully completed and the call stack cleaned up. Can anyone confirm this? And/or suggest a way around it?
Sylvia

Sylvia - I found your posting because I have a similar problem in which a JavaBean wrapped using the Packager needs to call a Visual Basic event subroutine from a thread other than the main thread.
This, I have discovered, is not supported in VB unless you use special thread marshalling calls (not available to the Java bean) or event queuing calls (ditto, afaik).
My point is that this may be related to your problem. Check this Microsnot document on their public support site:
Q196026

[REQUEST] Unity's/Compiz Modal Dialog plugin

Hello,
Would it be possible to get Unity's/Compiz's Modal Dialogs on Arch? I'm not that much of a programmer myself, but to me it seems like you'd have to install Ubuntu's Compiz package. It still is a plugin though, so I got some hope that some of you could still write a PKGBUILD for this. Sorry for not including the dependencies and such, but that is because of the above reason.
Thanks for your time!

i would bet that if you wait a while smspillaz (the head developer of Compiz, who works for Canonical now) will probably push this plugin into master (git). probably once he feels that it is stable...
One example; i first saw the 'grid' plugin's FX (the animated frames) appear in Unity, then a while later it was merged into git/master.
I'm sure if you mentioned interest either at his blog;
http://smspillaz.wordpress.com/
visit his youtube channel, and message/comment about it.
http://www.youtube.com/user/smSpillaz
or contact compiz-devs some other way... you could put it out there more directly. i don't think posting in the Arch forums will have any impact at all, on what plugins are pulled from Unity into Compiz. sure someone might make a pkgbuild, but it probably is something that should be done upstream and like i said - this will most likely be added to the master branch, you probably won't even need to get in contact at all.
if you look at the compiz.org cgit/gitweb logs, you'll see that compiz-devs merge into master/git from other branches all the time. they merge to master from a few branches such as the bzr branch, where this plugin currently is currently living, launchpad ~unity-team, etc.
http://cgit.compiz.org/compiz/core/log/
that's my 2 cents, cheerz

Automation Plugin: Problems with Shutdown/Quit on Mac

Hi,
I've created an automation plugin similiar to the listener-plugin example in the sdk and I'm poping up a modal dialog when receiving the shutdown message/call from photoshop. When I quit Photoshop, the dialog shows for about 1-2 secs then vanishes and photoshop crashes. On the other hand, on windows the shutdown process is halted until I dismiss the dialog by button, just as I expected from a modal dialog (and then photoshop exits normaly).
I also tried to receive the eventQuit notification, put this event never ever seems to be sent by the host (both on win & mac).
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks,
Marc

Thanks Tom. I now use a mac os notification class to pop up my warning
message, this works fine. However I'm still lookin for a way to receive event notifications before photoshop has handled them, something like the PreTranslateMessage method from windows/mfc. Would that be possible?
Also, sometimes I miss some of the events, e.g. when closing a dirty document, photoshops asks if I want to save the doc, but I only receive the close-event, not the save-event. I noticed this seems to be the case with all events triggered indirectly, as the save event when closing a dirty doc or opening/closing/saving a doc from my auto-plugin.
So my big question is, am I doing it wrong or am I trying the impossible?
Thanks,
Marc

How to create a modal dialog, which I can still interact with document when the dialog is show.

HI,
    Now, I am developing an automation plugin, and want to create a modal dialog, which I still can interact with document when the dialog is show.
    I find photoshop has some modal dialog have this function, such as the dialog of Customize Proof Condition and the dialog of Color Settings. Are these dialogs not modal dialog?
     Thanks!

The whole point of a modal dialog is that you cannot interact with other things while it is active.
And Photoshop does not support plugins accessing the rest of Photoshop while any plugin UI is active.

Automation plugin as action and via File/Automate

Hi,
I have an Automation plugin that is scriptable (it has a number of exposed scriptable parameters and can be recorded and run from Actions palette). The plugin displayes the UI when it is called interactively (from File/Automate).
I am however having troubles distinguishing when it is called from an Action palette as a playback of recorded action and when it actually was called interactively from File/Automate (testing it in Photoshop CS6). On plugin invocation I check passed action descriptor and if not empty, read parameters from it and don't show the UI. On the call end, I write script parameters back to a descriptor to be able to use them in recorded action. With this in mind, after PS start first time selecting File/Automate works as expected - no descriptor/parameters passed into the plugin. But after a first call, Photoshop seems to keep the descriptor/parameters written at the end of the plugin and passes it on subsequent user invoked File/Automate. The same happens if plugin is getting called from a recorded action playback (and its expected). Basically after a first invocaction, the plugin will always receive action descriptor whether it called from an action playback or invoked by user.
I need to distinguish these two cases and basically present UI/start from scratch when user invokes it and use the passed action parameters when action plays it. I have not found anything in SDK to point me to the solution so I'd appreciate the help.
In filter plugins I can at least get selector start when invoked from UI and use that to free/ignore the action descriptor data.

I don't think you should care. The option you do care about is this one:
PIDialogPlayOptions playInfo
That is part of PIActionParameters *actionParameters
That is part of your PSActionsPlugInMessage that comes into your automation plugin entrypoint.
This parameter has three options:
a) always display the dialog,
b) only display the dialog if you don't like the parameters you are given,
c) never display a dialog (either return an error or proceed with best options but don't stop with a dialog)
From the file menu, user selected, you should get option a (always). From the actions panel you should get option a or b. From scripting you can get all three options.
There is also a property in PIProperties.h called propPlayInProgress but the above information should be what you need to do the correct thing with dialogs.

Suspending UI in automation plugin

Is there a way to suspend UI during execution of automation plugin (C++ Windows, Photoshop cs5-cc). I mean updating display when plugin opens closes docs, add or remove layers.
Cna i suspend that and resume it after execution of the plugin.
I think that i have seen this somewhere long time a go but i can not find it now.
Regards,
Momir Zecevic

HI, I want create a dialog as your "wrong state", which i can still interact with the document when it show.
How you create this dialog? Can you give me your code ?
My hotmail is: [email protected]
Thanks.

Skillbuilders modal dialog - condition for parent page dialog

Hi
When using this awesome plugin, I have a dynamic action on my calling page that deals with the selection from the dialog.
It uses
Select type:DOM Object
DOM Object: document
Condition: javascript expression
($v('P110_PROD_SEARCH') == 'BLAH')
where the js expression is making sure I run the correct dynamic action, particularly when I have a few buttons on the page invoking different variations of the modal dialog.
My first action is some javascript that interrogates the value of
this.data.modalPageCloseValue
this helps me make decisions in later actions on whether to run some pl/sql, for instance
In light of a recent question of mine regarding a potential APEX bug (Display item with HTML affected by dynamic action and since we can't put conditions on actions - I was wondering if I could incorporate something into my dynamic action condition to stop the entire dynamic action from executing if modalPageCloseValue is null - but it seems to be out of scope?
Scott

Scott,
You're current condition is:
$v('P110_PROD_SEARCH') == 'BLAH'Just change that to:
$v('P110_PROD_SEARCH') == 'BLAH' && this.data.modalPageCloseValueRegards,
Dan
blog: http://DanielMcghan.us/
work: http://SkillBuilders.com/APEX/
twitter: https://twitter.com/dmcghan

How to get the Id of the component that caused modal dialog to terminate?

Hi,
I am developing a plugin for Acrobat. The plugin will have menu item. On clicking menu item a modal dialog will be opened. I am using DialogBox method to create modal dialog. But this method returns value which is the call to the EndDialog function used to terminate the dialog box. This means that on success it will always return 0.
But I want the ID of the component in the dialog which caused the dialog to terminate. What I mean is that I want that if Ok button in the dialog was clicked and dialog terminated then DialogBox method must return the ID of the Ok button.
Is there any other function that can be used to create dialog in Acrobat on windows??
Thanks.

Acrobat no longer has any API to dialog creation in a plug-in. So the question of knowing which of your buttons terminated the dialog is part of the API or library you actually use to do the display. If you are talking about the behaviour of the Windows GDI API, it's up to you what code to pass to EndDialog in your callbacks, when processing the BN_CLICKED notification. Personally I pass the control ID. If you are using a higher level wrapper it will be a function of that, but knowing what button closed a dialog is a basic need that any library should satisfy.

Modal dialog issue - very urgent

Hi everyone,
i'm working with indesign application under asp.net. I'm using Interop.InDesign.dll. I'm able to open Indesign, but when i try to change UserInteractionLevel, then application returns error "Cannot handle the request because a modal dialog or alert is active." I can't see what modal dialog is opened because, i can't see Indesign window. It is runing in asp.net context.
When i'm opening manually Indesign then none of the modal dialogs is active.
My code:
Type indAppType = Type.GetTypeFromProgID("InDesign.Application");
objInDesign = (InDesign.Application)Activator.CreateInstance(indAppType, true);
objInDesign.ScriptPreferences.UserInteractionLevel = idUserInteractionLevels.idNeverInteract;
Do you have any solutuion for it ?
Thanks.
Regards

I have similar issues.
Initially this was caused by the splash dialog that appears the first time a user launches InDesign. Logging in with the credientals used to launch InDesign, and checking the "Dont show again" checkbox cleared it up for me.
Later, I ran into the problem again when InDesign was trying to recover some autosaved files.
This was cleared up by deleting the recovered file information from the accounts AppData folder.
I'm now getting this error again, but so far I dont know why. I have no Idea what modal dialog InDesign is trying to display. How can I tell?
I've got to say, I'm very disapointed with this behavior.
If a programmer sets ScriptPreferences.UserInteractionLevel to InDesign.idUserInteractionLevels.idNeverInteract; this should inform InDesign that its launch is part of an automated process; there is no user available to press anything, and there is likely not a desktop to display anything.
It is far more important for InDesign to respect the ScriptPreferences.UserInteractionLevel than to try and recover documents or display a welcome dialog.
But since we are stuck with this exception, I have the following questions:
Is there a way to programmatically dismiss the splash "Welcome" dialog via script command?
Is there a way to programmatically respond to the dialog that is displayed when InDesign has recovered documents?
Is there a way to programmatically determine what modal dialog is causing the exception? (app.Dialogs is empty)
Thanks!

Swing event queue, modal dialogs, event threads, etc...

Hey all,
So I am playing around with the focus manager, swing event thread and event queue, etc. Learned quite a bit. I am also playing around with test automation of our UI, using jfcUnit. I have written a few simple apps to play aorund with record/playback, coding tests, etc. What this thread is about though, is figuring out how modal and non-modal dialogs "take over" the event thread/queue? The reason I ask is, if I put a simple test harness like tool embeded in my app as a separate pop-up modal dialog, and from within it there is a GUI that I can use to select a "Test" to run. Now, when I run this test, jfcUnit needs to run on the main window, not within my non-modal dialog. What I am not sure of, however, is that if by using a non-modal dialog all events will go to the main event thread? I mean, I know if I mouse over my second non-modal frame (spawned from the application frame), that events will trigger for that dialog. I remember reading somewhere that modal dialogs "block" the main event queue, all left over events are given to the newly added event queue (presumably by the modal dialog) and existing left-over events get moved to the event queue. If that is the case, I am curious why events for the "old" queue are moved to the new queue if they were orginally intended for the old queue? I would think a "flush" before adding a new queue would be more appropriate so that the old queue can process all of its intended events.
Now, I am just about to try this, but I am hoping a non-modal pop-up will not interfere with the jfcUnit running the UI of the main window. I am guessing, however, that it might. How are non-modal dialogs handled in terms of events and the event queue? Is it the same as modal dialogs? Or is there no blockage of the mainwindow event queue? If there is no blockage, than any sort of automation based on relative positions to a window may occur on the non-modal dialog, in which case it's best to hide the non-modal dialog during running of these tests.
What are your thoughts, or better yet, knowledge of this topic? A decent explanation from a developer standpoint and not from the API's which dont give some of the more detailed info I am seeking is what I am hoping to get out of this.
Thanks.

Check this out. First, AWTListener has a LOT of
different types you can register it for. I ORd all
them together and when I ran my app, it took almost 30
minutes for it to show up because of the huge stream
of events being spit out via System.out. ...Yes, that doesn't surprise me in the least. There's hundreds of events that are fired around, usually unbeknownst to the user for every little thing. Lots of component and container events, in particular.
Just make sure you OR ( using | not || ) ALL the
"mask" values you want to watch for. That may be why
you aren't seeing anything. When I did all that, and
opened a menu, a ton of events came out.Maybe, I'll try that again, but I did specifically add an ActionEvent mask to get action events, and that should be all I need to get action events on buttons or menu items, and it wasn't getting them for either. It was only getting events on buttons when I used SwingEventMonitor, but not menu items.
So I don't quite understand enough of the underlying event handling. Although, I suspect it could have something to do with the fact that these are Swing components, not AWT components (which their native peers) and it's pretty clear from AbstractButton (or was it DefaultButtonModel) how ActionEvents are fired, and they don't seem to have any connection to the code that deals with AWTListeners.
My problem is that I kinda need a way to catch events without having a listener attached directly. Normally, I would have a listener, but there's this situation whereby an action may be triggered before I can get hold of the component to attach my listener to it. Perhaps I can get mouse press/release and just deal with it that way.
Let me know if you did that and still didn't see what
you were looking for. After playing with this, I am
guessing the main reason for AWTListener is to
register a listener for a specific type of event,
instead of listening to them all, hence avoiding lots
of extra overhead. Then again, the main event
dispatcher must do a decent amount of work to fire off
events to listeners of specific awt event types.Yes, it's definitely that. There's no point in sending events if no one is listening for it, so it does save some time.
You are right, popup menus I think are dialogs, I
don't know for sure, but you can access them via the
JMenu.getPopupMenu() and JMenu.isPopupShowin().
However, I am still not getting my test stuff working
quite right.
Yes, for menu popups. For a JPopupMenu on a right-click on any component (tree or whatever), I had a need to know about that from any arbitrary application (it's this GU testing app I'm working on), and since the popup menu doesn't belong to any component before it's shown, I couldn't necessarily know about it til it was displayed. I managed to use a combination of HierarchyEvents (using an AWTEventListener) and "component added" ContainerEvents. Not a simple matter, but it seems to work well.

Modal dialog in Premiere Pro (using AE SDK)

Hello all,
I have a plugin that does some long, intensive processing inside a single render call. I show my own progress bar in a modal dialog while this happens.
This is working fine in After Effects, but it's causing a crash in Premiere Pro. I get a few messages through the WndProc but then they just stop coming. I've attached some code below. Does anyone have any idea what might be going on there?
many thanks for any help,
Hugh
Here's the code that creates the dialog:
//assume host window is foregrounded
hostWindow = GetForegroundWindow();
// also tried HWND hwnd; PF_GET_PLATFORM_DATA(PF_PlatData_MAIN_WND, &hwnd);
hDlg = CreateDialog(theDLL, MAKEINTRESOURCE(IDD_PROGRESS), hostWindow, reinterpret_cast<DLGPROC>(DlgProc));
SetWindowLongPtr(hDlg, GWLP_USERDATA, (LONG_PTR)this);
CenterDialog();
ShowWindow(hDlg, SW_SHOW); UpdateWindow(hDlg);
SetForegroundWindow(hDlg); BringWindowToTop(hDlg);
hProgress = GetDlgItem(hDlg, IDC_PROGRESS1);
SendMessage(hProgress, PBM_SETRANGE, 0, MAKELPARAM(0, total));
and here's the window proc:
static LRESULT CALLBACK DlgProc(HWND hWndDlg, UINT Msg, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam)
ProgressDialog *myOwner = (ProgressDialog*)GetWindowLongPtr(hWndDlg, GWLP_USERDATA);
switch(Msg)
case WM_INITDIALOG:
case WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING:
return TRUE;
case WM_NCLBUTTONDOWN: //prevent user moving the dialog box
if (HTCAPTION == wParam) return TRUE;
else return FALSE;
case WM_COMMAND:
switch(wParam)
case IDOK:
return TRUE;
case IDCANCEL:
myOwner->cancelled=true;
return TRUE;
break;
return FALSE;

Here's the code that is called periodically inside my processing to run the message pump, in case that's helpful:
SendMessage(hProgress, PBM_SETPOS, pos, 0);
HWND hProgText = GetDlgItem(hDlg, IDC_TEXT_PROG);
std::stringstream myStr;
myStr << "Frame " << pos << "/" << total;
SetWindowText(hProgText, myStr.str().c_str());
MSG Msg;
SendMessage(hostWindow,WM_ENTERIDLE,0,0L);
while (PeekMessage(&Msg, hDlg, 0, 0, TRUE)) {
if (!IsDialogMessage(hDlg, &Msg)) {
TranslateMessage(&Msg); DispatchMessage(&Msg);

[Mac/CC 2014] modal dialogs can't be displayed

Hi everybody,
I have ported a plugin from CS6 to CC2014, which works fine for almost everything, except one. Modal dialogs seems not to work anymore. For example, this code:
CAlert::InformationAlert(PMString("Hey, display me!"));
makes InDesign freezing. More precisely, InDesign displays a while rectangle, which seems to be the modal dialog. But there is nothing more, juste this white rectangle. I can move it, but can't interact with it. As it is a modal dialog, the application refuses all further interaction, and I can't close that modal.
I have noticed this behavior was the same with, for example, a Yes/No modal dialog. I suppose this happens on every modal dialog types.
Is there anything that can cause a modal dialog not to be able to display correctly?
Some pieces of informations on versions :
OS : Mac OS 10.9.4
InDesign : 10.1.0.71
Thanks to anybody providing any piece of advice.
Rémi

Must have opened my eyes after waking up...
I think I guessed what happens. This modal dialog is called from a model plugin, which works in CS6. I guess Adobe has removed support on anything that is UI-related in model plugin. But instead of generating an error, it makes some mess. I'll try to move the piece of code surrounding the modal dialog call to my UI plugin and see what happens.

Cannot handle the request because a modal dialog or alert is active in indesign CS6, C#

Hello,
I'm having bunch of indesign CS6 files. I have written piece of code in C# which opens indesign files & exports those files to xml & pdf. If I run the exe, it works properly. But when I schedule it via task scheduler (runs at point of time without
human intervention), it throws an error "Cannot handle the request because a modal dialog or alert is active" which results in failure of my process. This error keeps me annoying. So how to over come this error?
Any help would be grateful. Thanks in advance.

Hello,
Thank you for your post.
But your issue is out of support range of VS General Question forum which mainly discusses the usage issue of Visual Studio IDE such as
WPF & SL designer, Visual Studio Guidance Automation Toolkit, Developer Documentation and Help System
and Visual Studio Editor.
Because your issue is involved to InDesign CS6 which is third-party, we don’t support it, so I will move it to Off-topic forum.
Thanks,
We are trying to better understand customer views on social support experience, so your participation in this interview project would be greatly appreciated if you have time. Thanks for helping make community forums a great place.
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ADM CheckBox on Mac OS X on Modal Dialog

I am trying to add a modal dialog under the Illustrator menu for the plugin I am writing.
The modal dialog is showing up and the popups I am using are working correctly but I am having problems with my checkbox. When I call SetBooleanValue on my CheckBox If I pass in false or 0 it seems okay but if I call SetBooleanValue to set the checkbox to checked by passing true the checkbox does not appear. I believe the checkbox is checked because I need to click on it twice to get the checkbox to appear. In Illustrator I can check and uncheck the checkbox manually fine. When I try and use GetBooleanValue to get my value of the checked item it always returns 128.
The behavior is the same under AI 3 or AI 4. I am using a DLOG resource in a adm.rsrc file that I have added to my project. Any help would be appreciated.
/// setting value
ADMBoolean checkBoxValue = lBoolValue; // 0 or 1
sADMItem->SetBooleanValue(sADMDialog->GetItem(dialog, kStoreTextItem) , checkBoxValue);
/// gettting value
ADMBoolean bShouldStoreText = sADMItem->GetBooleanValue(sADMDialog->GetItem(thisDialog, kStoreTextItem));
/// bShouldStoreText always returns 128
Grant Hickey

Why is it so hard to specify ADM item in MAC resource file?
I want to create a check box
resource 'CNTL' (someItemId, purgeable) {
    {04, 14, 18, 14}, // top, left, bottom, right
    visible,
    ItemID, // ProcID
    0,
The ItemID specifies the checkbox, but where do you find all these IDs?
The only place I can find is in the samples.
No documentation for this type of stuff anywhere!
I don't know how you guys tolerated this rubbish all these years.
Please help!!!!!!

Modal Dialogs in Automation plugin?

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