Record the file paths of all open documents in AppleScript - applescript

Question

I am a newbie scripter in AppleScript.
I have some applications in which I have many windows or tabs opened. I would like to record their file paths or url in text files, so that I will be able to examine them later.
I could get the path of the front document in Preview:
tell application "Preview"
path of front document
end tell
But when I try:
tell application "Preview"
repeat with i in all documents
path of front document i
end repeat
end tell
this does not compile, with the error message: "Expected end of line but found plural class name."
I would very much appreciate for any insight that would help me.
Thank you very much in advance
ni

Answer 1

You can obtain paths to all open documents at once:
tell application id "com.apple.Preview" to set filepaths to the path of every document
Here's a trick to create a blank file if it doesn't already exist:
set f to "/Users/<you>/PreviewFileList.txt"
close access (open for access f)
# set eof of f to 0 -- This scrubs the file if it does already exist
The variable filepaths will be an AppleScript list, which you want to turn into a single piece of text that, say, itemises each filepath, one-per-line (assuming none of your file paths have newline characters in their names):
set my text item delimiters to linefeed
set filepaths to filepaths as text
This coerces the list to a text class object, thereby concatenating each item in the list with adjoining linefeed (\n) characters. That is to say, this:
{"/path/to/file.one", "/path/to/file.two", ..., "/path/to/file.nth"}
becomes this:
"/path/to/file.one
/path/to/file.two
.
.
.
/path/to/file.nth"
This is now stored in the filepaths variable, overwriting its previous value (we don't need the list object anymore).
Finally, write the text out to file, which will need to be explicitly encoded as UTF-8 in order to preserve Japanese characters when they are decoded as UTF-⒏ So, we do this as follows:
write (the filepaths & linefeed) as "utf8" to f starting at eof
(Adding a linefeed at the end is convention, and helps ensure that the next time you write to the same file, new content is added to the line below rather than the end of the sentence.)
Here's the whole script:
tell application id "com.apple.Preview" to set filepaths to the path of every document
set f to "/Users/<you>/PreviewFileList.txt"
close access (open for access f)
# set eof of f to 0
set my text item delimiters to linefeed
set filepaths to filepaths as text
write (the filepaths & linefeed) as "utf8" to f starting at eof
tell application id "com.apple.Finder" to reveal the POSIX file named f

Answer 2

There is no syntax all documents
It's either
tell application "Preview"
repeat with i in documents
path of i
end repeat
end tell
or
tell application "Preview"
repeat with i in every document
path of i
end repeat
end tell
or if you need the numeric index
tell application "Preview"
repeat with i from 1 to (count documents)
path of document i
end repeat
end tell
And front in a loop makes no sense because there is only one front document or window