Question

I want to open another separate application, open the projects/documents of that application in a iterative way and then close the application. I also want to close all the modal and non modals dialogs which popped up during the opening of the document. I want to close all the dialogs including the crash dialog in case the application fails/ crashes.

What will be the best way using cocoa or applescript to achieve this and from where i can get more detailed information?

Answer 1

If the app has a scripting interface, of course the best way is to do that.

You generally don’t want to iterate in AppleScript, but rather to operate on all of the results of a query.

For example, for almost any application that implements the “standard suite”, you can just:

tell app "TextEdit" to close windows

This is much simpler (and faster, and more likely to be implemented correctly in the target app) than:

tell app "TextEdit"
  repeat with theWindow in windows
    close theWindow
  end repeat
end tell

Of course this may pop up save/abandon changes dialogs, and it may skip over or include dialogs and inspectors, and so on, depending on the application’s user model.

More importantly, it won’t work if the app doesn’t support scripting (and the standard suite).

Also, it won’t help at all with closing a crash report—that window is owned by CrashReporter, not the original application (which is a good thing, because you can’t talk to the original application anymore, now that it’s crashed…).

The alternative is the UI Scripting features in System Events. This will only work if assistive access is enabled. It can also be a bit fiddly to figure out which windows are the ones you want to deal with, and which controls are the ones you want.

For example:

tell app "System Events"
  click button 1 of windows of application process "TextEdit"
end tell

This works by finding every window (no matter what kind) owned by the TextEdit process, and simulating a click on the first button in that window (the red close button).

If you google “AppleScript UI Scripting” you should find lots of different guides. The first hit I found was http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/applescripts-ui-scripting-mac/ and it looks like a decent place to start.