Re: Scripting Entourage 2001
Re: Scripting Entourage 2001
- Subject: Re: Scripting Entourage 2001
- From: Paul Berkowitz <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 28 Apr 2002 18:14:42 -0700
On 4/28/02 5:05 PM, "Stephen Swift" <email@hidden> wrote:
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Hi-
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I'm writing to (b) vent some steam and (a) hope that resident Microsoft
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Entourage Scripting Guru (Paul! :-) ) has advise (besides use E'rage v.X).
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My question:
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I know E'rage v.X can be controlled in much more detain through AppleScript,
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but I was wondering if anyone had some method of cheating to be able to set
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a task's due date. Thanks.
Not in any decent manner. The only workarounds are
a) to set the Remind time
b) to use an AppleScript handler, or a scripting addition, to convert
the AppleScript verbose long date into a short date and add the short date
to the name of the task so when it pops up in the reminder you'll know when
it's really due. You're at least fortunate that scripting additions work in
OS 9 and Classic, so you can use Akua Sweets' 'the clock' (or a similar
command in Tanaka's osax) to do an easy conversion
c) make a parallel calendar event whose start time is the same as the
task's due date (but you can't script an event's reminder in E2001, so you
need both event and task to get both the reminder and the start time)
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4) The property due date in task is read only. I understand why ID is read
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only, but due date!? I would like to be able to set a due date. But alas I
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cannot either using a record when I create a task or later on.
No good reason. They simply didn't have time to implement it before the
release of E2001, so task is lame and useless. That was remedied in
Entourage X, where you can set due date of task, also remind time of event,
also fixed a bug with equality of dates, and another with 'whose' clauses or
category, an another one, and another one, etc.. If you want to work easily
with tasks and events in Applescript you'll have to upgrade to Entourage X,
whose applescripting for all the PIM parts of Entourage, plus IMAP accounts,
is very much improved over 2001. I wasn't idle during beta-testing, and nor
were the developers. There are really a lot of fixes.
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--
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Upon scripting a few items such as notes, tasks, and events, I noticed a few
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things peculiar with Entourage.
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1) In notes or tasks there is no properties property but there is in events.
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It would have been nice if there was a properties property for them all.
I agree. Even nicer if there were a properties property for 'contact', which
has 52 properties. The most useful one is the one for 'message'. In
entourage X 'properties' of event now includes category and links, by the
way.
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2) In tasks and events the recurring property is read only. This makes
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sense sort of. It could have been to hard to make the recurrences of
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Entourage scriptable. But it certainly would have been a nice feature.
In Entourage X, there is a new 'recurrence' property for event, which uses
the RFC for this stuff. That _should_ have made it possible to make
recurrence writable (settable), but they didn't do it - yet. I'm sure they
will for a later upgrade. But it does let you make multiple single events
according to the recurrence, if you parse the darn thing. I think I'm going
to request credit (if not payment!) if anyone wants to borrow my parser
handlers - they took about a month to write, and are incredibly complicated.
probably about 500-1000 lines of code. It sure would have been nicer it they
had made the recurrence settable, but it works. They still haven't got
around to making the same recurrence property for task. Only for event...
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3) According to the dictionary, in events the property "all day event" is
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noted as [r/o] but I can state whether the event is an all day event of not
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using the record {all day event:true} when I create an event but I cannot
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change it to false afterwards using set all day event of the_event to false.
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Why did they want this property to be read only. It sure would have been
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useful.
Well, you're only the second person after me, I think, to discover that you
actually can set 'all day event' to true at the moment of inception.
Congratulations, You probably figured out you have to set the end time to
midnight of the next day, too. There are a few other r/o properties, in
Entourage and in other apps, which et you do this. It's always worth trying
out. You can always get all the other data, make a new event with the same
data but with 'all day event' true, then delete the event it's replacing.
That's almost as good as being able to set it.
--
Paul Berkowitz
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