More Applescript support

Classic Servoy
1

I’ve just discovered Servoy and i’m pretty convinced it can be the one tool to maintain all the databases we’re working with. At this moment i am planning to switch our projects to a *SQL/Servoy-based setup.

But there’s one difficulty: For catalogues and pricelists we use Applescripts to interact between Filemaker, InDesign and the Finder. Of course i’d like to do the same with Servoy. But the scripts we made are no ‘one trick ponies’ you can start by throwing a few lines through osascript. These scripts crawl through the pages of a catalogue layout, looking for text patterns, performing searches in the database, importing and exporting various database fields. Below i added some typical parts of such a script. How can i do that with Servoy? OK, i could bypass Servoy and make Applescript talk to the SQL server through another client, but i prefer an all-in-one solution. Do you plan to provide some accesibility for Applescript through Servoy in the future? Or should i first try to split our Applescript solutions into a library of ‘one trick’ functions that can be launched one by one from a Servoy script?

Sample scripts

Selecting a record

	tell application "Servoy Client"
		tell database 1 of window 1
			try
				show (every record whose cell "CatNr" = temp)
			on error
				return false
			end try
		end tell
	end tell

Importing record data

	tell application "Servoy Client"
		tell window 1
			set CR to the current record of database 1
			set cell "ScrStatus" of CR to "Gegevens inlezen"
			set Catnr to cell "CatNr" of CR
			set CatPrijs to cell "CatPrijsNL" of CR
			set CatPrijsPer to cell "CatPrijsPerNL" of CR
			set CatExtra to cell "CatExtraNL" of CR
			set cell "ScrStatus" of CR to "Gegevens ingelezen"
		end tell
	end tell

Exporting to InDesign

	tell application "InDesign CS"
		if not (exists BoxRef) then
			set FrameRef to make text frame at M-,
				beginning with properties M-,
				{geometric bounds:{"10 mm", "10 mm", M-,
				"72 mm", "54 mm"}, color:"none", M-,
				runaround:"NNRN", name:CatID}
		else
			set FrameRef to object reference of BoxRef
		end if
		if not (exists BoxRef) then
			return false
		else
			tell FrameRef
				set x to ("art. " & Catnr & " " & CatKop & ". ")
				set temp to x & CatTekst
				tell text of parent story
					set contents to temp
					set applied paragraph style to "Normal"
				end tell
			end tell
		end if
		set CatPagina to (name of page PageNr of document 1) as text
	end tell

References

An old Technote from Apple shows how to export Java objects and commands for Applescript availabity:
http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn1162.html

For the time being, this might be sneaky way to trigger some Servoy actions from AppleScript without need for ‘scriptability’:
http://www.apple.com/applescript/uiscripting/index.html