Apple

On Oct 19, 2009, at 4:10 PM, Nathan Vander Wilt wrote:

My main application bundles an AppleScript script and scriptable helper application.

These get bundled in the Resources folder of my main app's bundle like so:

MainApp
|-Resources
|-HelperApp
|-script

My MainApp calls the script to do some work, and the script uses the HelperApp to offload some work that was much more efficiently done in Cocoa. The problem is that the script can't find the HelperApp when it is deployed inside of the Resources folder of MainApp.

I could get the path of my HelperApp by either passing it as an argument to the script, or using "path to me". (Is the latter reliable? I know in many contexts relying on the executable path is strongly discouraged.)

I use this, for example, to get resources. Haven't had any problems.

set selfRef to (path to me)
tell application "Finder"
(folder menuFolderName of folder "Menu" of folder "Resources" of folder "Contents" of selfRef) -- internal empty folder with icon
set menuFolder to the result as alias

I also have helper applications in the main application's /Contents/Resources/ folder. They are used to call special handler's within the main application. I use this in the helper application ...

on run
tell application "Finder" to set hostAppl to (container of container of container of (path to me)) as text
ignoring application responses
try
launch application hostAppl
tell application hostAppl to handlerName()

But with either of those solutions I would need to implement this by replacing all occurrences of:
tell "HelperApp"
-- instructions
end tell

with:
global theHelperApp
set theHelperApp to application path "..."

tell theHelperApp
using terms from "HelperApp"
-- instructions
end using terms
end tell

My worry with doing this is that this still won't help osacompile find "HelperApp" during script compilation. How can I be sure that my script will always compile to the most current HelperApp's scripting definition? Is there a better way to approach this?

References:
	>How to reliably target a helper app that's inside a bundle? (From: Nathan Vander Wilt <email@hidden>)