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Re: Programmatically adding to one big Finder selection ?
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Re: Programmatically adding to one big Finder selection ?


  • Subject: Re: Programmatically adding to one big Finder selection ?
  • From: Graham Cox <email@hidden>
  • Date: Thu, 2 Jul 2009 11:17:52 +1000


On 02/07/2009, at 10:54 AM, André Berg wrote:

Well, after spending the whole day... I think it is really hard to do.

I haven't gotten anywhere yet, but if I find out something I will post it of course :)

I would say that unless the Finder explicitly exposes some API (maybe via scripting) to do this, you are out of luck. Trying to "trick it" into performing this using some more generic API is probably doomed to failure unless somewhere it is documented that it will definitely perform the task in the way you want.


I cannot imagine that this is an uncommon task...


On the contrary, I'd imagine that it's exceedingly uncommon.

If you want to select (highlight) arbitrary paths in a single Finder window, it means that window will have to first decide what the common root of all the paths is, then expand a possibly very deep hierarchy of those paths in order that all the given paths are visible. This raises so many usability questions that I find it little wonder it's pretty nigh on impossible *unless the user manually does it*. It requires too many smarts for such a minority need that chances are it's simply unimplemented.

Revealing a file in the Finder is usually done with reference to a single file to answer the question "where did I put that?", and the scripting support it provides reflects that usage.

If I'm wrong on this, no doubt someone will correct me - I have no inside knowledge. But if I were implementing something like the Finder, unless this feature was specifically part of the spec I wouldn't be implementing it just on the offchance it would be useful, because it'd be such a hard one to do!

--Graham


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References: 
 >Re: Programmatically adding to one big Finder selection ? (From: André Berg <email@hidden>)
 >Re: Programmatically adding to one big Finder selection ? (From: André Berg <email@hidden>)

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