What I wanted to do
I had a Cocoa document-based app. I.e. I had followed my nose with Cocoa, and ended up with an app that supported multiple documents. Documents are represented by in subclass of NSDocument called MyDocument.
I wanted to support viewing and changing properties of the document from AppleScript.
Note that I wanted to support 10.5+, so the techniques here may not be appropriate for older versions.
How I ended up getting it working
- Specify things in the app's Info.plist:
NSAppleSriptEnabled = YES
OSAScriptingDefinition = MyApp.sdef
- Made an sdef file, which includes all the framework supplied stuff, and that MyDocument extends the framework document, and has a property, refered to by the key numBananas:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE dictionary SYSTEM "file://localhost/System/Library/DTDs/sdef.dtd">
<!-- declare the namespace for using XInclude so we can include the standard suite -->
<dictionary xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2003/XInclude">
<!-- use XInclude to include the standard suite -->
<xi:include href="file:///System/Library/ScriptingDefinitions/CocoaStandard.sdef" xpointer="xpointer(/dictionary/suite)"/>
<suite name="MyApp Suite" code="LfMS" description="MyApp application specific scripting facilities.">
<class-extension extends="document" code="docu">
<cocoa class="MyDocument"/>
<property name="number of bananas" code="Bana" type="integer" access="rw" description="The number of bananas in this document" >
<cocoa key="numBananas"/>
</property>
</class-extension>
</suite>
</dictionary> - Implement KVC accessors for the property. These looked (sortof) like:
-(NSNumber*)numBananas
{
return [NSNumber numberWithInt:bananas];
}
-(void)setNumBananas:(NSNumber*)value
{
bananas = [value intValue];
}
This was all that it took, and now I can enumerate all the docs, set their number of channels etc etc.
Apologies to all my regular readers if this is slightly outside your sphere of interest!
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