CODEWITHSUNDEEP
cocoapropertiesapplescript
Dmitry
Dmitry

Reputation: 7350

Scripting Cocoa application property

I have a property of my application in my sdef dictionary called busy

<property name="busy" code="mybs" type="boolean" access="r" description="Is application busy?">
    <cocoa key="isBusy"/>
</property>

Also I have NSApplication category with isBusy accessor

- (BOOL)isBusy
{
    return NO;
}

The scripts

tell application "MyApplication"
    properties
end tell

and

tell application "MyApplication"
    busy
end tell

work fine and busy property is false, but script

busy of application "MyApplication"

returns error

error "MyApplication got an error: Can’t make |busy| into type specifier." number -1700 from |busy| to specifier

Where is my mistake?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 401

Answers (2)

Chris Page
Chris Page

Reputation: 18703

Since busy is a term specific to your application, it must be preceded by tell or using terms from to make the term known at that point in the code. Any of these will work:

tell application "MyApplication" to busy

tell application "MyApplication"
  busy
end tell

using terms from application "MyApplication"
  busy of application "MyApplication"
end using terms from

AppleScript parses left-to-right and has to know what the valid terms are before it can parse them. It doesn’t skip to the end of busy of application "MyApplication" to figure out how to parse the start of the expression. If MyApplication had a term busy of it would completely change the meaning of that expression and cause a paradox: of would no longer be the keyword used to construct object specifiers, which means it wouldn’t get terminology from MyApplication, which means it would be the of keyword and it would get the terminology from the application…ad infinitum.

You may be wondering why some application properties, like name, version and running work without introducing the application’s terminology. They work because they’re defined by the global system terminology and are not specific to your application.

Note that the 's possessive operator does not introduce terminology like tell does, so this doesn’t work, either (unless you precede it with a tell or using terms from):

application "MyApplication"'s busy

Upvotes: 1

cocoafan
cocoafan

Reputation: 4894

This will not work because it is an illegal Apple Script sentence. The get command, which was suggested by regulus6633, will prepended automatically if you omit it (See Events tab in Apple Script Editor). And each command needs a performer to execute it. The implied get command has in your broken sentence no container which is necessary to build a specifier like "blah of blah of blah"t

Upvotes: 0

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