Challenge Accessing Item Properties

Scripting Forums AppleScript | Mac OS X
#1

Hi All,

I’m trying to do something to spot free/available time across multiple calendars.

First step is to get all of the calendar information. I’m able to successfully do that…

    
set theCal to calendar id 116
    set theDate to current date
    
    set entries to every calendar event of theCal whose start time is greater than or equal to theDate

This gets me all of the calendar entries for calendar id 116.

When I try to access the items in “entries” though it behaves strangely and I only seem to be able to access the properties properly when I return the value rather than through a dialogue or logging.

This code…


    repeat with entry in entries
        log entry's subject
        return entry's subject
    end repeat

Gives the following output…
subject of calendar event id 3429
Cancel Zacks ultimate membership

Whatever I seem to use (id, subject start time, etc) the return statement works correctly and the log just prints out the name of the property prefix to “of calendar event id 3429”, eg “id of calendar event id 3429”.

I’m a newbie to AppleScript so I’m not sure if this is an issue or I’m just doing it entirely incorrectly!

Thanks,
Pete

#2

Hi. Welcome to MacScripter.

Ideally, you should say what application you’re trying to script. The 'id’s of macOS’s own Calendar app aren’t in that format and it doesn’t have ‘calendar events’, ‘start times’, or ‘subjects’.

But I think the problem you’re describing is a quirk of the ‘log’ command. It’s not important to the working of the script. But a workaround might be force the resolution of the ‘subject of calendar event’ specifier by setting a variable with it and logging the result of that:

repeat with entry in entries
	set theSubject to entry's subject -- Set a variable to the subject of the calendar event.
	log theSubject
	return theSubject -- Presumably this is for test purposes
end repeat