AppleScript: The Definitive Guide

Scriptable, Recordable, Attachable

These three adjectives refer to three levels on which an application can be scriptable. They aren’t really levels, but they seem to form a natural progression. That progression seems to have diminishing returns, since very few scriptable applications are also recordable, and very few scriptable applications are also attachable.

Scriptable

An application is scriptable by means of AppleScript if it defines a repertory of Apple events to which it is prepared to respond, and publishes that repertory in a dictionary. So, the usual way to learn whether an application is scriptable is to try to open its dictionary with an editor such as the Script Editor. If it has a dictionary, it’s scriptable.

(At least, that’s how things are supposed to work. We’re assuming here that all the pieces of the mechanism are behaving properly. It’s possible for an application to lie. For example, it could publish a dictionary giving the impression that it responds to Apple events it doesn’t respond to. At the furthest extreme, an application could look scriptable, in the sense that it publishes a dictionary, but not actually be scriptable. Yes, I’ve seen applications that do that.)

Recordable

The idea of a scriptable application’s being recordable is that the application can help the user learn to drive it with AppleScript by constructing a script in reverse: the user performs ordinary actions in the application, choosing from menu items, pushing buttons, or whatever, and ...