Apple® Automator with AppleScript® Bible

Appendix D. Automator Actions and Variables

IN THIS APPENDIX

• Actions

• Variables

In this appendix, I'll provide a summary of the basic actions and variables available in the Snow Leopard version of Automator. This is not meant to be a comprehensive reference featuring everything you need to know, just simply a summary.

Actions

The standard Automator actions include these different categories or groupings:

• Calendar

• Contacts

• Files & Folders

• Fonts

• Internet

• Mail

• Movies

• Music

• PDFs

• Photos

• Text

• Utilities

In addition, Automator provides two smart groups: Most Used and Recently Added. You can create your own smart groups, of course, to help you to stay organized.

One final note before you venture any further. Each action will normally have some kind of input and some kind of result. For example, if you're filtering calendar events, you start by giving the action a set of iCal events as input. Once the action processes those events, you end up with some kind of result — in this case, a set of filtered iCal events.

Calendar

Calendar actions are designed to help you with workflows that deal with events, calendars, and other calendar-like activities. Figure D.1 provides a visual summary of the standard actions in this group.

Figure D.1. The Calendar actions

The following is a list of standard Calendar actions:

• Delete iCal Events: This action permanently deletes iCal events, without any chance for undoing the delete. Input ...