Re: set contents of cells by AppleScript

[Larry Kollar <Larry.Kollar@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bill Briggs wrote:

>>The following snippet appends " hi" to the text of each cell in
>>the selection....

>  I think your code works fine. But it was not clear from the original
>post if the person wanted to delete the original text and replace it,
>or just add to it. And if it's multi-paragraph text in the cell, what
>he wanted to do with that.

True. My intent was to show him how to get the changed text back
into the right cell after changing it. Tacking a short string to
the end of the text was there mainly as a placeholder.


>  One other oddity that is exhibited in this script. Once you make a
>change to the first cell of the selection, the selection disappears.
>If you select the range manually as was assumed in Larry's script,
>then you need to use the reference form he did to assign the
>selection to a variable. If you make the selection in the body of the
>script based on some calculation, then you can use this kind of
>approach to "retain" (actually re-select) the cells within the
>script. It's a bit goofy, but it works with no problem.

You can use "select myCells" to restore the selection as well.
The Perl enthusiasts have a saying: "there's more than one way
to do it." :-)  Making the selection programatically allows
for batch processing; selecting the text & then running the
script over the selection is better for interactive use.


Here's a slightly revised version of my original script; I've
bummed out the inner "tell" (which seems to have given the
script a significant speed boost), added some error checking,
and restored the original selection. (The "‚" is a not-equals
character, just in case it doesn't show up right in some mailers.)


tell application "FrameMaker+SGML 6.0"

	-- Abort if the selection isn't part of a table.
	if (selection class of active document) ‚ table range then
		display dialog "You must select one or more table cells."
		tell me to quit -- if saved as an application
	end if

	set myCells to (selection of active document) -- or document 1

	(* Manipulate each cell of the selection. We pull the text
	   into a list to make it easy to get at if needed. Cast
	   myData as a list even if only one cell is selected. *)
	set myData to (get text of myCells) as list
	set n to (count myData) -- get # of cells
	repeat with i from 1 to n
		-- do something to (cell i of myCells)
	end repeat

	-- Restore the selection
	select myCells

end tell


-- end of script

I have to keep reminding myself that Adobe fixed a LOT of bugs
in Frame's AppleScript support from 5.5.1 to 6.0; I don't have
to always use nested "tell" constructs to get something done.

	Larry



** To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@omsys.com **
** with "unsubscribe framers" (no quotes) in the body.   **