1.11.07. AppleScripting Across the Universe

After a long day at work, I wrote a long message in Basecamp about what I had accomplished, how to access it, etc. But I forgot to submit the message! Crud. I wanted to send it out before morning and didn’t want to go into the office. I couldn’t get any screen sharing connection to go between the machines. I just had a handful of SSH leaps.

AppleScript to the rescue!

This is probably the most AppleScript that I’ve ever written. Fortunately, Safari supports the command do JavaScript ... in tab. After some floundering around with a similar setup on my local machine, I finally figured out AppleScript’s interesting reference notation and was able to ferret out the window and tab containing the unsent message, add some text to the message’s textarea element, submit the form, and return the extended value.

tell application "Safari"
    set message_tab to current tab of window named "Web site > New message"

    set extended to ".... Fun fact - i wrote this before i left the office and forgot to submit it. as a result, i now know how to submit forms like this via AppleScript."
    set post_body_value to "$('post_body').value"
    set extend_value to post_body_value & " += '" & extended & "';"

    do JavaScript extend_value in message_tab
    set body_value to do JavaScript post_body_value in message_tab

    do JavaScript "document.forms[0].submit();" in message_tab

    return body_value
end tell

I pasted the above code into VIM and ran it with the command line osascript command. Worked like a champ.

And because sleep is for the weak, I decided to track down how to do the equivalent in Python. Mac OS X 10.5 provides a “Scripting Bridge” for Python and Ruby (and potentially others), which causes many frameworks and other objects to be dynamically exposed. Without the need (for better or worse) of yet-another-virtual-machine. Anyways, I cobbled the following together:

from Foundation import *
from ScriptingBridge import *
safari = SBApplication.applicationWithBundleIdentifier_('com.apple.Safari')

def find_window_named(name):
    for win in safari.windows():
        if win.name() == name:
            return win

window = find_window_named("Web site > New message")
message_tab = window.currentTab()

print safari.doJavaScript_in_("$('post_body').value", message_tab)
safari.doJavaScript_in_("document.forms[0].submit()", message_tab)

There may be a better way to do the find_window_named method, but I didn’t have the time to track it down. As it was, I was able to do do the above by playing around with everybody’s favorite Python tool, dir(), which verified my suspicion that many of the commands exposed to AppleScript were also available via the Scripting Bridge. This is evidenced by the currentTab() method of a Safari window, analogous to the current tab of window ... AppleScript. And I imagine most of these are just Objective C methods. And since AppleScript editor’s Dictionary browser told me about the do Javascript [v] in tab [t] command, it stood to reason that it would exist on the Safari object. It was there when I did pprint(dir(safari)), and I knew that I’d need to pass in a Tab object.

In any case, it’s awesome that Apple has embraced Python and Ruby and has tied them in to the Cocoa runtime. Historical note: the first Python - Objective C bindings that I know of where commissioned by a NeXT Developer who wanted to use Python and Bobo (zope.publisher) to do web work with NeXT’s Enterprise Objects Framework, without the weight and cost of WebObjects. I think that means that Python was bridged into the Objective C runtime and NeXTStep frameworks before Jython ever got going. I believe that work was done by the developer who later released Objective Everything which bridged into Perl and TCL as well as Python.

Of course, traditional MacPython from the classic Mac OS was also natively tied in to the AppleScript of that era; AppleScript has always supported other dialects (FrontierScript was a common one).

But it’s nice now to see support coming out of both Apple and Microsoft (and Sun too, I guess) for these languages. The above scripting of Safari was surprisingly easy. As was an earlier experiment to fish around my calendar store for incomplete To-Do items. Quite nice.

But what’s especially nice is that I was able to SSH into my office Mac and tell Safari to submit that form that I had neglected earlier.