Sorting entries in the object manager

After reading a few of the posts that have to do with shape looping and other related topics, i don't have high hopes that what i propose below is achievable... but here goes.

I was hoping that someone might already have written some code that first determines the types of objects that exist in a document and then sorts them in the object manager by type. Ideally, this code would also sort within a certain type of object by property.

For example:
If a document contained 2 paragraph text objects, 5 artistic text objects, and two curves (one red and blue, but both have the same line weight), would it be possible to sort these items in the object manager so that the order would be as i have listed them?

The documents I envision using such a code on have only about 5 different object types, but about 3000 individual objects. In addition, the curves in my documents have many different colors and line weights used. I've found that the "find objects" command combined with a "to front" action is less work overall than manually hiliting objects in the object manager and using the "to front" action, but is still very tedious.

Thanks in advance,
Dan

[Alex]

Dan,

The Object Manager shows the objects in the order as they are placed in the document. That is, objects that are on the very top of a layer go first, then the object beneath it and so on. To order your shapes in the object manager, you need to actually change the order of objects with respect to each other. In most cases it will screw up the layout (objects that used to be on top of the page might appear under some objects after reordering).

This can be done by using methods such as Shape.OrderBackOf, Shape.OrderFrontOf and similar. Or you might want to create several layers, and place different object types on different layers. Obviously there will still be problems if you have various objects groupped, or if you have some complex effects applied, such as a blend between a rectangle and an ellipse.

But other than that, it's quite doable.