Re: [MacPerl] Glue: Report from the field

[Chris Nandor <pudge@pobox.com>]

At 15.51 -0400 1999.06.14, Mat Marcus wrote:
>It would be convenient to have the POD display which properties are
>read-only. Also, there is no indication of the allowable elements. Finally,
>the name of the inherited class could be useful here. All of these are
>available in Script Editor's view of the dictionary.

Good ideas, I will look into it.

>I wonder if it would be possible to apply verbs to AEObjDescs as well as to
>Glue e.g.:
>
>	$doc1 = $myGlue->obj(document=>1);
>	$doc1->set($myGlue->obj(property=>'name'), to=>'newName');
>
>This would allow direct translation of the original version of the
>AppleScript.

Hm.  I just got rid of AEObjDesc for the next version!  :)  The only reason
why was that they no longer had a use.  I can add them back in.  But I
would need to make sure that any descs the glue returns are AEObjDescs.
Not a problem, I think.  AEObjDesc objects would all be like this:

  bless {DESC => $desc, GLUE => $self}, 'AEObjDesc';

Then $objdesc->{GLUE} could provide all the info I need.  I might have to
save this for the next version, though.


>Anyway, my first attempt looked something like this:
>
>	use Mac::Glue;
>	use Mac::Files;
>	use Mac::Types;
>	use Mac::AppleEvents::Simple;
>
>	$i = new Mac::Glue 'InDesign';
>
>	$mySpreadSpec = $i->obj(property=>'active_spread',
>property=>'active_window');
>	#$myPlacedObjectSpec =
>$i->place("System:Code:Shuksan:QA:TestFile:art1.tif", on=>$mySpreadSpec);
>
>Here I encountered my next problem. Noting that the 'place' verb expects an
>FSSpec as it's first parameter I tried passing a plain old string as in
>AppleScript. The application did receive an FSSpec. But it was invalid.
>Apparently the string was being directly stuffed into the FSSpec's fields.

Odd.  It works for me, using various events that ask for an fss.  Hm.  I
tried it in the last release (19990607) and it doesn't work.  Oh well, it
does now.  :)  Or, it will in the next release.

>	$myPlacedObjectSpec = $i->place(MacPack('fss
>',"System:Code:Shuksan:QA:TestFile:art1.tif"), on=>$mySpreadSpec);
>
>This worked. Maybe this is a service that Glue could easily provide?

That is what I do, basically.  Detect an fsspec is wanted, and pack it.


>the next line. The 'place' verb returns a reference to an object. However I
>found it difficult to use $myPlacedObjectSpec in a glue expression. My first
>naive approach was to try:
>
>	#$i->set($i->obj(property=>'geometric_bounds', $myPlacedObjectSpec ),
>to=>["6p0", "6p0", "18p0", "18p0"]);
>
>This didn't work. After examining the Glue source code I happened on this
>hack:
>
>	$myBlessedObjectSpec = bless {DESC=>$myPlacedObjectSpec}, 'AEObjDesc';
>	$i->set($i->obj(property=>'geometric_bounds', $myBlessedObjectSpec ),
>to=>["6p0", "6p0", "18p0", "18p0"]);
>
>Perhaps Glue could do this blessing for me when an object reference is
>returned?

Previously only AEObjDescs could be passed in like that.  I changed it so
you could pass in AEDescs or AEObjDescs, but then only AEDescs once I
removed AEObjDesc.  I think in preparation for using object descriptors as
targets, I will put AEObjDesc back in, and you can pass either an AEDesc or
an AEObjDesc in here.



>P.S. One more thing. I couldn't get this to translate:
>
>##Applescript:
>tell application "Indesign"
>	name of document 1 -- this works fine
>end tell
>
>##Perl:
>
>use Mac::Glue ':glue';
>use Mac::Files;
>use Mac::Types;
>use Mac::AppleEvents::Simple;
>
>
>$i = new Mac::Glue 'InDesign';
>print $i->get($i->obj(property=>'name', document=>1));
>print $^E;
>
>This prints -1728.

Hm.  Odd.  I have no idea why, but that too is broken in the last release,
but works in my current version (using BBEdit as the target).  Odd indeed.
Oh well, I have it working now, so I won't worry about why it was broken
before.  When i do a diff for the version history, maybe I'll take a look
and see if I can find out.

Thanks very much for your feedback, and I hope I've addressed your concerns
satisfactorily.  I may or may not do the doc fixes in the next release, but
I will add in AEObjDesc, though I won't make it the target this time around
(unless I get on a roll tonight :).

--
Chris Nandor          mailto:pudge@pobox.com         http://pudge.net/
%PGPKey = ('B76E72AD', [1024, '0824090B CE73CA10  1FF77F13 8180B6B6'])

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