AppleScript: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition

AppleScript Studio Scriptability

It is natural to wonder whether an AppleScript Studio application is scriptable. The news here is something of a mixed bag.

AppleScript programmers who are accustomed to writing applets, which are inherently scriptable, will be disappointed to learn that AppleScript Studio applications are not scriptable in quite the same easy way. The mere presence of a top-level entity in an applet's script makes the applet scriptable with respect to that entity, but no such thing is true of an AppleScript Studio application. So, for example, you cannot simply tell our SearchTidBITS application to displayResults( ) (see Example 27-7). The problem is that an AppleScript Studio application is not merely an application shell wrapped around a script; it's a true Cocoa application. So your message isn't magically routed to the correct script, because in the way stands the entire mechanism of a Cocoa application.

On the other hand, an AppleScript Studio application is scriptable with respect to the entire AppleScriptKit.sdef dictionary, which is actually visible to users though a script editor application as if it were your application's own dictionary. This means that whatever built-in commands you can give from within the code of an AppleScript Studio application, a user can give from outside it. For example:

tell application "SearchTidBITS" activate tell window "search" tell matrix 1 set content of cell 1 to "AppleScript" set content of cell 3 to "Matt Neuburg" end tell ...