Re: on AESend blocking input events (was Re: Tell Blocks Considered Harmful)
Re: on AESend blocking input events (was Re: Tell Blocks Considered Harmful)
- Subject: Re: on AESend blocking input events (was Re: Tell Blocks Considered Harmful)
- From: has <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2008 20:02:58 +0000
Chris Page wrote:
To be clear, when a script issues the ‘display dialog’ command, the
script pauses until the dialog is dismissed and the command is
completed. Similarly, the application running the script usually
pauses, too. Most applications don't respond to user input while
waiting on an Apple Event to reply.
The I believe the behavior is determined by the send mode options
such as kAEQueueReply and kAEProcessNonReplyEvents.
That's not what I was referring to. I was referring to user
interaction, e.g., mouse clicks and keyboard input. The Apple Event
send mode only controls Apple Events, not user input events.
When an application sends an Apple Event to another process and waits
for a reply (the usual case), while it is waiting for the reply the
application doesn't respond to user input events, by default. They
have to make an effort to work around a barrier presented by AESend()
in order to do that, and most don't.
AESend dates back to the bad old pre-OS X days where you had to jump through hoops to do things concurrently. I doubt there's many situations in OS X where you really need to use it. Nowadays, if you want to avoid blocking your application's main event loop while sending Apple events, you would send your events from a background thread via AESendMessage, allocating the thread its own Mach port to receive replies on. (I've done it myself using appscript.)
The only exception would be if your application is running an AppleScript, and it's the AppleScript that's sending the events - in that case you have to do it on the main thread due to AppleScript's lack of thread safety. (Thanks for that info, btw, Chris.)
has
-- Control AppleScriptable applications from Python, Ruby and ObjC:
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