Get titles of menu items in a contextual menu

Scripting Forums AppleScript | Mac OS X
#1

Can anyone offer any advice on how to go about getting the titles of every menu item in an arbitrary contextual menu?

e.g.
Suppose we are dealing with TextEdit. I would like to be able to obtain a list of all of the menu items that are displayed when I Right-Click in the main Text Area.

Why? So that I can compare this list with a list of the menu items that I expect to find.

Some problems I have encountered:

  1. Contextual menus don’t appear within UI Browser (although you can invoke them using an object’s Actions).
  2. I haven’t had success with trying to contruct the widget hierarchy for an ‘arbitrary’ contextual menu. (From info gleaned using UI Element Inspector)
  3. I’ve tried code of the format:
    set menutext to title of menu item of menu 1 of text area 1 of scroll area 1 of window “Untitled” as list

without success.

If anyone can offer any insight, advice, etc., then I would be very grateful. If I can provide more information I will be happy to.

#2 

tell application "TextEdit" to activate
tell application "System Events" to tell application process "TextEdit"
	tell window 1 to tell scroll area 1
		tell text area 1
			perform action "AXShowMenu"
		end tell
	end tell
end tell
delay 5

NOTE: contextual menu disappears when the script ends and focus takes the Script Editor. So, I add some delay for the test purposes.

You can continue after perform action “AXShowMenu”, For example, clicking menu item “Services” of contextual menu:

click menu item "Services" of menu 1 -- of text area 1 of course
#3

On my side I would use:

tell application "TextEdit" to activate
tell application "System Events" to tell application process "TextEdit"
	set frontmost to true # Useful with 'old' systems
	tell window 1 to tell scroll area 1
		tell text area 1
			set {{x, y}, {w, h}} to {position, size}
			tell me to do shell script "/Users/admin/bin/cliclick kd:ctrl c:" & (x + w div 2) & "," & (y + h div 2)
			tell first menu
				name of menu items
				--> {"Couper", "Copier", "Coller", missing value, "Police", "Orthographe et grammaire", "Substitutions", "Transformations", "Parole", "Orientation de la mise en page", "Services"}
			end tell
		end tell
	end tell
end tell

Yvan KOENIG running High Sierra 10.13.6 in French (VALLAURIS, France) dimanche 11 aout 2019 12:36:15

#4

Yes, it is better to get all names of menu items instead of menu items themselves, but no need click-click here:


tell application "TextEdit" to activate
tell application "System Events" to tell application process "TextEdit"
	tell window 1 to tell scroll area 1
		click
		tell text area 1
			perform action "AXShowMenu"
			set menuTemsNames to name of menu items of menu 1
		end tell
	end tell
end tell
-- {"Look Up “version”", "Search With Google", missing value, "Cut", "Copy", "Paste", missing value, "Share", missing value, "Font", "Spelling and Grammar", "Substitutions", "Transformations", "Speech", "Layout Orientation", "Services"}
#5

Thanks.

I don’t understand why, when I tried to get the name of menuIetms after issuing perform action “AXShowMenu”, I got nothing.
Now it works.

Yvan KOENIG running High Sierra 10.13.6 in French (VALLAURIS, France) dimanche 11 aout 2019 14:36:43