From jvansanten at gmail.com  Sat Jan  3 20:57:51 2009
From: jvansanten at gmail.com (Jakob van Santen)
Date: Sun, 4 Jan 2009 02:57:51 +0100
Subject: [Rubyosa-discuss] Get elements by name
Message-ID: <AC9F8989-F6EC-4367-B6C7-3BB5B8601B9B@gmail.com>

Hi,

while it seems that RubyOSA is dead at the moment, I thought some  
people might find this useful:

RubyOSA allows you to access elements in a container by index, but not  
by name (i.e. the equivalent of "set the value of field 'Author' to  
'foo' in AppleScript). As it turns out, this can be done entirely on  
the Ruby side by overriding OSA::ObjectSpecifierList::[](idx) and  
building a name-based object specifier when idx is a String:

class OSA::ObjectSpecifierList
   def [](idx)
     if idx.kind_of?(String) then
       o = obj_spec_with_name(OSA::Element.__new__('utf8', idx))
     else
       idx += 1 # AE starts counting at 1.
       o = obj_spec_with_key(OSA::Element.__new__('long',  
[idx].pack('l')))
     end
     o.instance_variable_set(:@app, @app)
     o.extend OSA::ObjectSpecifier
   end

   private

   def obj_spec_with_name(element)
     @desired_class.__new_object_specifier__(@desired_class::CODE,  
@container,
                         'name', element)
   end
end

Now I can interact with BibDesk  
( doc.fields['Author'].value=foo )without fighting with AppleScript.  
Hooray!

Cheers,
Jakob