AppleScript: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition

Compiled Script Files as Script Objects

A script can read a compiled script file and incorporate its contents as a script object. Similarly, a script can save a script object out to disk as a compiled script file. You might use this mechanism as a means of implementing file-level persistence, or to build a separate library of commonly needed code that all scripts can share.

The mechanism depends upon three verbs. They're not part of AppleScript proper, but are implemented in a scripting addition (Chapter 3) that's standard on all machines.

Reference Section

Reference Section

Reference Section

(On aliases and file specifiers and the differences between them, see Chapter 13. The verb run script, instead of a file, can take a string, and it then functions as a kind of second level of evaluation; see Chapter 19.)

When you save a script object with store script, the lines delimiting the script object definition block (if any) are not included. This fact makes sense, since those lines were never part of the actual script object to begin with. So, for example:

script sayHello
    display dialog "Hello"
end script
store script sayHello in file "myDisk:myFile.scpt" replacing yes

What is saved in myFile.scpt is the single line:

display dialog "Hello"

Data Storage

Recall from earlier in this chapter that top-level script object entities are persistent, but that at the level of a file on disk, this persistence is unreliable, because it depends upon the environment where the script runs. For example, Entourage's ...