AppleScript: The Definitive Guide

Element Specifiers

To refer to a particular element, you must say which one you mean. To do this, you use an element specifier (or just specifier for short). A specifier has two components: the name of a class and some way of picking out the right one(s). AppleScript has eight built-in forms of specifier,^[7] and these are the only ones you are allowed to use. The next eight sections describe those eight specifier forms.

The variety of specifier forms makes a specifier quite an interesting and complicated part of an Apple event. If you look back at the raw Apple event shown as Example 4-1, you will see a repeated pattern involving four items called form, want, seld, and from. That pattern denotes a specifier.

In real life it will rarely be open to you to use just whichever specifier form you please. Given any particular application, object, and class of element, only certain specifier forms will work, and experimentation is the best guide as to which ones they are. An application’s dictionary is supposed to help you here, but it might not be accurate (Section 19.5.2).

Name

An element may have a name, which is some kind of string. To specify an element by name, say the class followed by the name:

tell application "Finder" to get disk "main"

You may insert the keyword named between the class and the name, but I never do.

Typically, there is also a name property, so that you can learn, based on some other element specifier, how to specify a particular element by name:

tell application ...