Indesign CS3: page items basics

I’m pretty far using data merge to automate matching strings to data fields. But I’m stuck on images.

Normally to figure stuff out, I check out the properties of working item and compare it to the dictionary.

My issue is with placeholder page items. It does not show up in a data merge property. The dictionary says it is a page item on which to place the placeholder.

OK, so perhaps it’s an object reference? This is my attempt that fails:


tell application "Adobe InDesign CS3"
	set a to (data merge fields of data merge 1 of document 1 whose field name is "CI84")
	set b to object reference of selection
	set c to make new data merge image placeholder with properties {placeholder page item:b, field:a}
end tell


It bounces back with a generic "“Adobe InDesign CS3 got an error: Can’t make class data merge image placeholder.”

So, my question is, how do I describe a page item? I’m aware of all page items, which is a list of object references. So I’m unsure why my scriptlet failed above. So what should a page item look like?

thanx, sam

Not knowing or having much experience with data merge to even set up an example to work with makes it hard to guess. I would suggest trying coercing a and/or b into a list to see if that works, ID might be expecting a list but you are giving it a string.