Dropdown Menu

This category contains information relating to dropdown menu properties.

In expressions, the .value of a dropdown menu is returned as an index (a number). This is true of both customized Menu properties of Dropdown Menu Controls and dropdown menus of other effects and layers. The strings in dropdown menu properties of effects and layers are also accessible via the properties/methods below.

On this page, effect("Dropdown Menu Control")("Menu") is used as a sample on how to call these items; however, note that any method that returns a dropdown menu Property will work.

Notes

• These APIs are available only in expressions using the JavaScript expression engine.

• The text of Layer Control dropdowns is not accessible with these APIs. If you need the selected layer's name, you can use the .name property of the layer returned by the Layer Control.

Attributes

items

effect("Dropdown Menu Control")("Menu").items

Description

Returns an array of all the text strings in a dropdown menu property.

Type

Array of Strings

Example

Show all the strings in a dropdown on separate lines:

const menu = effect("Dropdown Menu Control")("Menu");
const allStrings = menu.items;

allStrings.join("\n");

text

effect("Dropdown Menu Control")("Menu").text

Description

Returns the currently-active text string of a dropdown menu property at the current time.

Type

String

Example

Show the selected dropdown text directly in a Text layer:

effect("Dropdown Menu Control")("Menu").text;

Show the current Fractal Type from the native Fractal Noise effect:

effect("ADBE Fractal Noise")("ADBE Fractal Noise-0001").text;

Methods

textAtTime()

effect("Dropdown Menu Control")("Menu").textAtTime(time)

Description

Returns the text string of a dropdown menu property at the specified time, in seconds.

This is effectively the same as how valueAtTime() relates to value, in that text will always return the dropdown string at the current time, and textAtTime() can return the string at a specific time.

Parameters

Returns

String