[Pythonmac-SIG] AppleEvent examples

[Mark Day]

On Monday, August 12, 2002, at 02:00 PM, Jack Jansen wrote:

> On maandag, augustus 12, 2002, at 09:55 , Mark Day wrote:
>> For really simple AppleScripting stuff, the OSAm module in 
>> :Mac:Contrib: is very handy since you can take ordinary AppleScript 
>> source and pass it to CompileAndExecute.  For some uses, it may be 
>> simpler to use Python to build up the AppleScript source on the fly 
>> and then let AppleScript compile and execute the actual AppleEvents 
>> rather than try to build up the AppleEvents inside Python.
>
> If this is true then we're doing something wrong. For static scripts, 
> okay, but if it is easier to dynamically create Applescript code than 
> it is to use Python's own OSA API then we have to rethink the way the 
> API is structured.
>
> Do you have examples of it being easier to go via Applescript?

For background, I was sending an AppleEvent to one application to 
create a file, having Python massage the data a bit, then sending an 
AppleEvent to a second application to open the modified file.

I already knew AppleScript's syntax to get the events I wanted.  The 
only part that needed to be dynamic was a filename or two, and that was 
trivial as long as I assumed that I could ignore quoting issues (which 
was true for the few systems it was deployed on).

To be honest, I put very little effort into trying to understand how to 
do it directly in the Python OSA API.  I read 
:Mac:Demo:applescript.html and took a quick peek at the Disk Copy demo. 
  Right after that, I found the OSAm module.  It sounded like it would 
take a bit of effort to get started using the Python OSA API, compared 
to a simple string substitution in an existing AppleScript (via 
OSAm.CompileAndExecute).

If it needed to be more robust with volume/folder/file names, or if I 
had to do something more complex with the applications, I think I would 
have made the extra effort to understand and use the Python OSA API 
rather than spend a lot of time trying to build up scripts that 
AppleScript would parse properly.

-Mark