Getting text of enumerated properties

Scripting Forums AppleScript | Mac OS X
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#1

G’day all,

Many scriptable applications define enumerations. For example Image Events defines:
“color space” as one of the following enumerated types:

Eight channel/Eight color/Five channel/Five color/Seven channel/RGB/Lab/XYZ/Six channel/CMYK/Six color/Seven color/Named/Gray

I would like to be able to get the text of the enumeration within a applescript, rather than having to have a double list of text items and color space enumerated values, for example the first few values of the list might look like:

set colorMapping to {{color space:Eight channel, colorText:“Eight channel”}, {color space:Eight color, colorText:“Eight color”}, {color space:Five channel, colorText:“Five channel”}, …}

which I would then have to iterate over looking for the color space that I have got to determine the desired text.

Suggestions etc. would be appreciated.

Kevin

#2

Hi,

Maybe you can just coerce it to string. I don’t have Image Events but using QuickTime, something like this:

tell application “QuickTime Player”
(scale of front movie) as string
end tell

gl,

#3

That works thanks,

Can you do it the other way, and convert a string into a enumerated type.

Kevin

#4

Hi,

Yes, you can do this, but I’m not sure if it works for all enumerated types and different applications. Something like this using the ‘run script’ standard addition:

tell application “QuickTime Player”
activate
set the_scale to (run script “double”)
set scale of front movie to the_scale
end tell

gl,

#5

AppleScript and some applications’ implementation of AS allow you to do simple coercions from strings to constants:

return "true" as constant

But again, applications may not support this and it appears Image Events does not:

tell application "Image Events"
	--return class of Eight channel
	set the_color_space to "Eight channel" as constant
end tell

Jon