Hi Craig

I've tried to modify your example such that the "Set Text" button loads an rtf document from a file and displays it in the Text View.  Here's the crux of what I thought was a simple edit to the setTextViewFromTextField subroutine :

Applescript:

on setTextViewFromFile_(sender)
textView's readRTFDFromFile_(choose file with prompt "Select your subtitles file:" of type {"rtf"} without invisibles)
end setTextViewFromFile_

But this is throwing up an error as follows:
-[NSButton readRTFDFromFile:]: unrecognized selector sent to instance

Which seems to suggest to my badly out of my depth cocoa-newbieness that textView is thinking it belongs to the NSButton class rather than the NSTextView class ... clearly I've messed something up. Can you point me in the right direction so I can get where I'm trying to go.

Ultimately I'd like my little test app to read in and display an rtf file, then I would want to parse that file line by line and extract info for font, size and style, and to spit that out as an XML file. So far I have all that working via AppleScripting the TextEdit app (and then programmatically saving that out the parsed file as an XML) but as a next step I'd like to be able to skip the TextEdit step and do it in AppleScriptObjC, including importantly the displaying it part!

Greatly appreciate any help you can offer, especially what the heck is screwy in my logic in the above seemingly oversimplified code

Cheers
Andy


EDIT: So I think I realized the first of my errors above was in not correctly connecting the App Delegate to the NSTextView item in Interface Builder ... having connected that up properly (I think) I'm now no longer getting the NSButton readRTFDFromFile:]: unrecognized selector error, but instead am now getting:

-[NSAppleEventDescriptor length]: unrecognized selector sent to instance

Bugger. Out of the frying pan and into the fire

EDIT 2: Aha! Should have used POSIX path.

Last edited by andymees (2010-10-21 08:54:27 am)

It depends very much on what you're doing. For some things, AS will be too slow -- but then for some things, Objective-C is too slow and people resort to straight C.

The main use case is when you are using AppleScript already -- so generally when you are scripting another app or apps. That's not to say it can't be used for stand-alone stuff, but that's no really what it's designed for, nor is it ideal for that.

Not really. It's more about giving scripts that drive other apps access to Cocoa -- mainly for UI, but as is the nature of such things, anything else that will help them.

If you know C, Objective-C syntax probably takes half-a-day at most to get the hang of. And you use a similar approach in AppleScriptObjC -- the same goes for using the other bridges, for Python, Ruby, etc. Cocoa and Objective-C are closely entwined.

You get a mixture. The AS component is loaded at run-time -- it depends very much on the dynamic nature of the Cocoa runtime.

You have to coerce the result to text. Something like:

if textFieldValue as text = "" then

My favorite way to determine an empty string is the length method.
There's no overhead and you can compare directly to an AppleScript integer value

Applescript:

   on setTextViewFromTextField_(sender)
       set textFieldValue to textField's stringValue()
       if textFieldValue's |length|() is not 0 then
           textView's setString_(textFieldValue)
           beep
       end
   end setTextViewFromTextField_

Last edited by StefanK (2011-06-01 04:52:39 am)