Listen to "document change" events in XD panels?

Adobe XD UXP Plugin API
1

Is there a robust way to listen to “document change” events (focus/blur)?
I need to know which document/window is in front (if there are multiple documents open)…
application.activeDocument is not providing this…

As far as I know this is not possible yet. Just want to make sure I didn’t miss anything here :wink:

2

Simon–

There is only one active document per plugin instantiation–i.e., a plugin is started up for each document, so there’s always just the one, and it’s always active.

You get document change notices via your panel’s update callback.

3

Thanks Chris for the reply. That’s true. Each document (XD window) gets its own panel instance. But I can have multiple windows/documents open at a time, right? I need to know which window/document is in front or has the focus… or simply which document the user was touching last.

Consider this a feature request for something like:

XD_window.addEventListener(‘blur/focus’, …);

or

require(“application”).globalActiveDocument

or

require(“application”).activeWindow

–Simon

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4

There is no specific event for simply switching between multiple document windows. The closest thing is update(), which fires whenever the user changes the selection or any document content.

https://adobexdplatform.com/plugin-docs/reference/ui/panels/update.html

Each document window is running an independent instance of each plugin. If you would like multiple instances of a plugin to communicate/coordinate with each other, then one idea is to write data, such as the last touched document’s title or GUID, to the plugin’s data or temporary folder:

https://adobexdplatform.com/plugin-docs/reference/uxp/storage-index.html

5

Thanks David. That is exactly what I did so far: using the update event. But it is not the most elegant way. It will be fired way too often. That is why I was looking for a more effective solution…

In the future it would be nice to have the main window propagate a blur/focus event to the plugin context…

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6

What’s the use case? Curious.

7

I have to connect to an external app that should always show which document the user currently has selected or is in front and has focus…

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