[Pythonmac-SIG] CGI + appscript newbie question/problem

Mon May 28 16:44:39 CEST 2007

On Sun, May 27, 2007 at 05:04:25PM -0700, Andres Francisco Rojas wrote:
> but when I try to import appscript into the script run as cgi I get
> an 500 Internal Server Error. 

Typically you should look in the Web server logs
(/var/log/httpd/error_log) in that case to see the details of the
error, which are not returned in the browser to preserve security.
You can also do:

    import cgitb; cgitb.enable()

at the beginning of your script, so you get a nice HTML traceback if
you get a Python exception.

The thing is, I tried your script (after cleaning it up slightly) and
I don't get a 500 error or the expected result, I simply get the
following in the error log:

"INIT_Processeses(), could not establish the default connection to the
WindowServer."

Since you're using /usr/bin/python and assuming you're using 10.4.x,
that should be the system Python 2.3.5.  What version of appscript are
you using?  (You can print it with 'import appscript;
appscript.__version__').

> # Define function to generate HTML form.
> def generate_form():
>    print "<HTML>\n"

'print' already includes newlines, you don't need to use them.  Not
that string printing is a recommended templating mechanism, but if you
do need to do it, you might try one of Python's other quoting styles;
you can always use single quotes so you don't need to escape things,
or triple quotes for multiline strings.  For example, instead of:

    print "\t<FORM METHOD=post ACTION=\"1.cgi\">\n"
    print "\t<INPUT TYPE=hidden NAME=\"action\" VALUE=\"launch\">\n"

use:

    print '\t<form method="post" action="1.cgi"'
    print '\t<input type="hidden" name="action" value="launch">'

So, as other people mentioned, you don't have access to control local
apps as the Web server user.  This is a good thing for security.
However, you may be able to use remote Apple Events to do it.  I
couldn't figure out a way to get a remote application to launch
without using the Finder.  Appscript fails because it can't get the
app's terminology; with terms=False on a non-running TextEdit, I get
"AppData instance has no attribute 'path'".

This is really hacky, but it works sometimes; other times I get a
timeout during terminology retrieval.  This may just be my slow old
machine.

    app(url='eppc://user:password@127.0.0.1/Finder').startup_disk.files['Applications:TextEdit.app'].open()
    texteditGUI = app(url='eppc://user:password@127.0.0.1/System%20Events').processes['TextEdit']
    app(url='eppc://user:password@127.0.0.1/TextEdit', path='/Applications/TextEdit.app').activate()
    mref = texteditGUI.menu_bars[1].menus
    mref['File'].menu_items['New'].click()
    mref['Edit'].menu_items['Paste'].click()
    mref['Window'].menu_items['Zoom'].click()

Replace user:password with your username and password, above.

>                mref['Window'].menu_items['Zoom Window'].click()

On my 10.4.9 machine this menu item is "Zoom", not "Zoom Window".

-- 
Nicholas Riley <njriley at uiuc.edu> | <http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/njriley>