Conan C. Albrecht wrote:
I'm using appscript to script Word and BibDesk. I need to run the
script from the "Scripts" menu in one of these programs. However,
my .py script won't show up on their menus, even if the script is in
the right directory.
I assume you're referring to BibDesk. I'm not familiar with it, but as
far as I can tell it uses the OSA API to run scripts from its script
menu. This means that it can only run scripts written in OSA languages.
In theory, you can turn any scripting language into an OSA component;
in practice, packaging most popular interpreters as OSA components is
a complete PITA due to design shortcomings in both. With Python, you
have two very limited options:
- Philip Aker's PythonOSA component, which provides basic OSA support
only (load/compile/run/store). It has no Apple event integration, so
while PythonOSA scripts can use appscript to control other
applications, it can't send or receive events to/from the process
running the script, greatly limiting its usefulness.
- My PyOSA component, which supports the majority of the OSA API,
including sending and receiving events. It is developer-release-
quality only and no longer under development (I've stopped working on
it due to the limitations of the CPython interpreter that make it less
than ideal for in-process use). Unsupported; use entirely at own risk,
etc.
The python script will show up on the system-wide scripts menu, but
not on an application's menu.
The system-wide scripts menu supports both OSA and shell scripts.
To fix this, I added a simple AppleScript to the same (scripts)
directory. I've included this at the bottom, if it helps. So the
AppleScript runs first, then it calls "do shell script" to run the
Python program. My problem is that the script can't call any GUI
functions, such as the following:
import osax
sa = osax.OSAX() # allows use of standard additions (like display
dialog)
sa.display_dialog("Hi world")
If I run from the command line, the dialog shows up fine. If I run
from within Word or BibDesk, the dialog doesn't show up at all.
- Try calling sa.activate() to bring the Python process frontmost
before telling it to display the dialog.
- If you are using Python 2.3, make sure you run the script with
pythonw, not python (which can only perform GUI operations on Python
2.4 and later).
- If your Python script is sending commands back to the application
that's running the AppleScript, you will need to detach the Python
process so that the AppleScript can immediately return control to the
host application without waiting for the Python script to complete.
Otherwise the AppleScript will block the application's main event
loop, preventing the application handling events from the Python
process and deadlocking everything until the event times out.
HTH
has
--
Control AppleScriptable applications from Python, Ruby and ObjC:
http://appscript.sourceforge.net
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