Popupsearch disappears

Hey @Forrester_Savell!

Let's see if we can clear up the fuzziness. It may help to start with the premise that the ultimate goal of this particular script is to call sf.ui.proTools.selectedTrack.trackOutputSelect() at the end. When we call sf.ui.proTools.selectedTrack.trackOutputSelect(), that method looks for an outputPath property of the array type. Therefore, our ultimate goal is to end up with an array by the end of the script.

Then, starting from the top, we first call outputPathButton.popupMenuFetchAllItems().menuItems, which gives us the array of objects with the properties Path, Names, Delimiter, and Element. In this instance, the Path property and the Names property are equivalent.

It does make sense that Path and Names are somewhat redundant in the resulting mapped object from that part of the script, however, there's an important change happening here.

sf.interaction.popupSearch() needs an array to search, and specifically, it expects an array of objects that contain a name property, as we discovered earlier. The other piece to this puzzle, though, is that sf.interaction.popupSearch() expects that name to be a String, not an array. This means if we were to call something like this:

let items = outputPathButton.popupMenuFetchAllItems().menuItems.map(function (item) {
        return {
            name: item.names,
        };
    });

Yes, we could potentially get away with using the item.names as an array to feed sf.ui.proTools.selectedTrack.trackOutputSelect() at the end of the script, but if we feed this version of the items object to sf.interaction.popupSearch(), it will fail because we have just given sf.interaction.popupSearch() an array of objects with name props holding arrays and not strings.

Therefore to keep the flow of the script moving we are using calls like:

item.names.join(' > ')

or

item.names[item.names.length - 1]

These convert the array from the names prop outputted from outputPathButton.popupMenuFetchAllItems().menuItems into strings that can be used by sf.interaction.popupSearch().

Because we need an array of objects with a name prop of type string to feed sf.interaction.popupSearch() and then we inevitably also need an array to give sf.ui.proTools.selectedTrack.trackOutputSelect() at the end of the script, we will need to have an array of objects with both a name and a path property. Like this:

let items = outputPathButton.popupMenuFetchAllItems().menuItems.map(function (item) {
        return {
            name: item.names[item.names.length - 1],
            path: item.path
        };
    });

Maybe the simplest way of thinking about it is that we can use the name prop as a "searchable" string, but that string can also be linked to a more complicated array, which we will need to feed sf.ui.proTools.selectedTrack.trackOutputSelect() in the end.