Using ScriptingBridge framework for communicating with Entourage

Question

Hi,

The motivation for my question is the following doc, which describes how mail.app could be integrated using ScriptingBridge:

http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/samplecode/SBSendEmail/Introduction/Intro.html

I tried to apply a similar technique with Entourage as well but could not get any results so far. I understand that using AppleScript would help me solve my problem and mactech.com has extensive documentation for doing so.

But i find this ScriptingBridge technique elegant and want to figure why it is not working for me with Entourage.

The biggest problem seems to be my inability to create Scripting classes based on their names as it happens in Mail because Entourage has a different interface than Mail as their headers indicate.

Could someone please tell me what I am missing or provide any sort of hint on why this wont work?

I am also adding sample code

`

MicrosoftEntourageApplication * mail = [SBApplication
applicationWithBundleIdentifier:@"com.Microsoft.Entourage"];
MicrosoftEntourageOutgoingEmailMessage * emailMessage = 
[[[mail classForScriptingClass:@"outgoing message"] alloc]
initWithProperties:
[NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:
@"my sample subject", @"subject",
@"my sample body", @"content",
nil]];

//then i create a set of recipients and try to use "to recipient" as the string scripting class id, but MicrosoftEntourageRecipient is returned as nil 

MicrosoftEntourageRecipient * theRecipient =
[[[mail classForScriptingClass:@"to recipient"] alloc]
initWithProperties:
[NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:
@"[email protected]", @"address",
nil]];

`

I am trying to make the simple thing work, I am not even concentrating on the task I am supposed to do now.

I am a Cocoa beginner( and willing to learn ), please excuse an syntactic naivetes and do point them out in the sample code, in addition to answering my question.

Best Regards,

Subramanian

Answer 1

A few things:

1. If you're stuck, first figure out how to do it in AppleScript. That's what most application scripters use (i.e. the folks best able to help you) and what almost all documentation is written for. Realistically, if you want to do much application scripting, you really need to learn some AppleScript (just as you really need to pick up a bit of ObjC to use Cocoa from Python, Ruby, etc).

2. Scripting Bridge is clunky, obfuscated and prone to application compatibility problems, so translating working AppleScript code to it can be tricky, if not impossible, depending on the application you're targeting, the commands you're using, and so on. From memory, I think Entourage is one of the apps it trips up on, in which case you're out of luck unless you resort to using raw Apple event codes. Other options are objc-appscript (m'baby), which is much less prone to such problems, and AppleScriptObjC (10.6+), which lets you call ObjC classes directly from AppleScript and vice-versa.

3. Have you looked at CSMail?

4. Entourage is going away in Office 2010 in favour of Outlook, so you may not want to invest a huge of time figuring out how to write SB code for it anyway.