Searching for birthdays in Address Book

[Andrew_Duncan]

Although the AppleHelp for Address Book says explicitly “You can use Address Book to remember your friends’ birthdays”, its search box ignores the birthday field. I want to say something like this:

tell application “Address Book”
set thePeople to every person where month of birth date is “December”
… etc …

It compiles fine but the app doesn’t like it
(NSCantCreateScriptCommandError). I tried a few obvious variations.
Can I do this in the one-liner where clause like I want, or will it
take something more complicated?

Andrew

[jonn8]

I got it to work using something a little more complicated:

–Open this script in a new Script Editor window.

set birth_month to month of (current date)
tell application “Address Book”
set the_people to (every person whose birth date is not missing value)
set birthday_folks to {}
repeat with this_person in the_people
tell this_person
if month of (get birth date) = birth_month then set end of birthday_folks to name
end tell
end repeat
end tell

return birthday_folks

Jon

---

[This script was automatically tagged for color coded syntax by Convert Script to Markup Code]

[Andrew_Duncan]

Thanks, Jon, that was just what I needed. Nice touch, first getting only the entries that actually have birthdays, that saves lots of time. Where did you come by the info about “missing value”? I didn’t find it in the Address Book dictionary.

Andrew

[Ray_Barber]

Andrew, you can list all of the properties of every person, which shows ‘missing values’

–Click here to open this script in a new Script Editor window.

tell application “Address Book”
get properties of every person
end tell

[This script was automatically tagged for color coded syntax by Script to Markup Code]