For all the vaunted easy programmability advertised for AppleScript, my
experience has been that an AppleScript rarely works across two major releases
without needing to be debugged and rewritten to accommodate some change in the
OS.
I have a script that I wrote way back on Jaguar that takes all the messages
currently selected in Mail, constructs forwarded messages for each of them that
conform to SpamCop's requirements, ships them off to SpamCop, and then moves
them to a spam archive. i've had to change it for changes in the format of a
new mail message, for the renaming of "Address Book" to "Contacts," and for
several other issues since Jaguar.
The most recent breakdown in this script was from Yosemite, I believe. I
determined that the problem was that the lines:
tell application "Contacts"
activate
simply were NOT working. If Contacts was already running, the script would
work fine. If it wasn't, it would never launch, and the script would silently
do nothing.
I don't understand why this is so. The Apple language ref
<https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/AppleScript/Conceptual/AppleScriptLangGuide/reference/ASLR_cmds.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40000983-CH216-SW60>clearly
says it should be launched if it isn't already running, but it isn't happening.
Even more indicative of something rotten in Denmark, there's a dictionary issue
I never saw previously in any other context. Here is the block of code:
tell application "Contacts"
activate
set spamcopPerson to first person whose nickname =
spamcopRecipientNickname
set spamcopEmail to value of first email of spamcopPerson
set fromSenderRecord to first person whose nickname = fromSenderNickname
set fromSenderPersonality to value of first email of fromSenderRecord
set fromSender to name of fromSenderRecord
# close window "Contacts"
end tell
Or at least that's what appears when Contacts is currently running. When it is
not currently running, the code turns into this;
tell application "Contacts"
activate
set spamcopPerson to first «class azf4» whose «class az43» =
spamcopRecipientNickname
set spamcopEmail to «class az17» of first «class az21» of spamcopPerson
set fromSenderRecord to first «class azf4» whose «class az43» =
fromSenderNickname
set fromSenderPersonality to «class az17» of first «class az21» of
fromSenderRecord
set fromSender to name of fromSenderRecord
# close window "Contacts"
end tell
Clearly there's some issue with the dictionary being unavailable when Contacts
isn't running. I don't understand why this might be. The script also has a
large block that tells application "Mail" quite a number of things, but that
code doesn't mysteriously obfuscate itself when Mail isn't running.
Has anybody seen this? Does anybody know how to make this work properly?
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