'me' wrote:
I am having much fun with appscript and QuarkXpress6.x [...] Unfortunately, when you do get lost like I am. You're completely lost.
While appscript saves you from the vagaries of the AppleScript language, it can't do anything about bugs and quirks in individual applications' scripting interfaces.
Would someone please share their method for
figuring out what my app instance is returning,
and how I can coerce that into a form I can utilize?
[...]
Quark = appscript.app('QuarkXpress')
pw = Quark.documents[1].page_width #This is what I want
Remember that while appscript uses an OO-like syntax for convenience it's not OO. It's a simple relational query builder plus RPC wrapper. Ditto AppleScript, except it has an even thicker layer of syntactic and semantic sugar on top. The downside of this is that it causes quite a bit of confusion amongst users who assume that because it looks like OO it will behave like it too.
(I've considered changing the syntax to avoid this problem, but that'd impact badly on its ease of use. I'd rather keep the syntax but make sure users know it's really just smoke and mirrors. Expect a bigger health warning in the docs for the next release.)
>>> type(pw) <class 'appscript.specifier.Specifier'>
The line:
pw = Quark.documents[1].page_width
simply constructs a query (represented as an appscript Specifier object) identifying the page_width property of the first document element of the QXP application. To actually retrieve the value of that property from the application, you have to send the application an explicit 'get' command:
pw = Quark.documents[1].page_width.get()
>>> pw.get()
<_AE.AEDesc object at 0x1181c38>
This is a typical Quarkism: returning an opaque value that only it understands instead of using a standard AE type. AEDesc is the MacPython type used to hold raw Apple event data (in AS it'd appear as <<data ...>>), and is returned here as appscript doesn't have a suitable converter for it. If you're sending this value back to QXP, no problem. If you want to manipulate it in your script, you'll need to ask QXP to coerce it to a standard datatype (integer, float, string, etc.) before returning it, e.g.:
pw.get(astype=k.Char)
Not sure which coercions are supported here, so you may need to fiddle with it a bit. Good place to ask for QXP-specific advice would be [e.g.] the MacScrpt mailing list <http://listserv.dartmouth.edu/scripts/wa.exe?A0=macscrpt>.
HTH
has -- http://freespace.virgin.net/hamish.sanderson/ _______________________________________________ Pythonmac-SIG maillist - Pythonmac-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pythonmac-sig
