I want to be able to have a script which can detects if I have new messages in my messaging apps.. Slack, lync,.
Is it possible to use applescript to read if there is any active notification on the apps in the Dock..
If you do:
`getconf DARWIN_USER_DIR`/com.apple.notificationcenter/db
(which line I found at Ask Different), you'll get returned:
/var/folders/_d/pg2g_[some_funny_numbers]/0//com.apple.notificationcenter/db: is a directory
Inside this/my folder I found:
db db-shm db-wal db2upgraded
When some action happens (I sent a notification) only db-wal gets updated (nearly) at once.
So, in principle it should be possible to write an AS (saved as Stay Open app) that periodically looks if "db-wal" has changed (comparing saved sizes or change dates) and, ONLY if so, searches it for some keywords (Slack, lync,…) again comparing # of occurrences, thus learning if s.th. new has arrived. Admittedly sounds awkward but could work.
It would be much more elegant to use a folder script, but as no file is moved nor a folder opened/closed such a script can not be invoked.
Related
I have a simple script that opens a file (log file), parses through it looking for specific log entries/keywords and for each entry that matches it triggers an alert.
The problem that I am trying to solve is that I would like to modify the script to remember the alarms that were already sent when it was last run, so that if the script re-runs it won't keep sending an alert for previously sent alerts.
The coding language is Golang, what are the a valid approach to do this? A database sounds like overkill, but I don't know what other alternatives are out there?
It depends on the nature of the log file: server log (classic) or transation log.
Even assuming the former, it depends on its Log Management (long term retention, rotation, ...)
Assuming a classic log files whose data are appended (not overwritten), a simple approach would be to generate in a file the line where the alert is found.
At the next run, if that line matches one stored in that special "flag" file, the alert would not be sent again.
Alright, so, I'm working on a script to execute some commands in an MMC Snapin, and I'm not very experienced with doing this kind of scripting, but i've made a lot of progress...the problem I am having, is if I create a new object every time the script runs, it will massively delay my overall script while the snapin and everything in it loads(which can take as long as five minutes). If it could load the snapin content once and then just take control of it as needed, and only create a new object IF there's not one open already, I'll save a massive amount of time when I run the script sometimes 100 times in a day.
The problem is, I'm not entirely certain how to achieve this. I thought, after some research, that it would be GetObject, but when I do
Dim objMMC
Set objMMC = GetObject("", "MMC20.Application")
It seems to create a new mmc window with no snapins loaded, rather than get the existing one with snapins loaded that I want.
Any advice? Am I just totally off base here, using completely the wrong command, or is there some simple change that I can make to fix this?
Edit:
Is there some weird workaround way I could achieve this, like storing an object to a temporary file so i can at least reuse it through a single session.
I'm in a weird situation where I am trying to add functionality to a powershell script and couldn't find a way to do it directly in powershell, so i'm setting up a vbscript to do one piece of it and calling the vbscript from powershell. I already had to do a lot of research to figure out how to do it in vbscript(and i'm still not sure about all of it) so i guess before i go any further, I'll try to figure out if this is even viable(in vbscript or c# or c++ or any other language someone could suggest)...
What i want to do, overall, is check if an MMC window is open that contains a DHCP snapin. If so, assign it to a variable. If not, create one.
Then it will read from a csv or txt file, and use the values to determine what node to navigate to within the snapin(DHCP>ServerName>IPv4>ScopeName>Scope Options).(I've mostly solved this part in vbscript, but don't know how to do it in C++ or C#)
Finally, I need to be able to execute a right-click menu item to "configure options", navigate the tabs of the popup that comes up, enter a value, and apply the changes/hit ok to close the popup. Worst case, If I can't do it "normally" by actually sending commands to the objects themselves, this part I can do with imitating keystrokes, but i don't want to do that if it's avoidable because it's sloppy.
Then, I basically will just need to somehow alert the powershell script that i'm "finished" so it can continue, or give an alert if there's an error.
I'm not asking anyone to walk me through all this, I just want to know if any of those steps aren't viable as i've described them, especially if I'm going to have to switch to c++ or c# to achieve the first part and therefore relearn the commands needed.
... and only create a new object IF there's not one open already ...
No, this is not possible in VBS, you need to do
Dim objMMC
Set objMMC = WScript.CreateObject("MMC20.Application")
if I create a new object every time the script runs, it will massively delay my overall script
In this case is the VBS the wrong language, you need to use C# or C++ executable.
Does the problem I am facing have some kind of a fancy name like "Dining philosophers problem" or "Josephus problem" etc etc? This is so that I can do some research on it.
I want to retrieve the latest log file in Windows. The log file will change its name to log.2, log.3, log.4 .....and so on when it is full(50MB let's say) and the incoming log will be inserted in log.1.
Now, I have a solution to this. I try to poll the server intermittently if the latest file (log.1) has any changes or not.
However, I soon found out that the log.1 is changing to log.2 at an unpredictable time causing me to miss the log file (because I will only retrieve log.1 if log.1 has any changes in its' "Date Modified" properties).
I hope there is some kind of allegory I can give to make this easy to understand. The closest thing I can relate is that of a stroboscope freezing a fan with an unknown frequency giving the illusion of the fan is freezing but the fan has actually spin lot of time. You get the gist.
Thanks in advance.
The solution will be to have your program keep track of the last modified dates for both files log.1 and log.2. When you poll, check log.2 for changes and then check log.1 for changes.
Most of the time, log.2 will not have changed. When it does, you read the updated data there, and then read the updated data in log.1. In code, it would look something like this:
DateTime log1ModifiedDate // saved, and updated whenever it changes
DateTime log2ModifiedDate
if log2.DateModified != log2ModifiedDate
Read and process data from log.2
update log2ModifiedDate
if log1.DateModified != log1ModifiedDate
Read and process data from log.1
update log1ModifiedDate
I'm assuming that you poll often enough that log.1 won't have rolled over twice such that the file that used to be log.1 is now log.3. If you think that's likely to happen, you'll have to check log.3 as well as log.2 and log.1.
Another way to handle this in Windows is to implement file change notification, which will tell you whenever a file changes in a directory. Those notifications are delivered to your program asynchronously. So rather than polling, you respond to notifications. In .NET, you'd use FileSystemWatcher. With the Windows API, you'd use FindFirstChangeNotification and associated functions. This CodeProject article gives a decent example.
Get file-list, sort it in decending order, take first file, read log lines!
We have a PDF document processing system, implemented in AppleScript (where we call the scripts from the shell using osascript). In some of the scripts, we call Acrobat Preflight Droplets from the Applescript.
This does usually work without problems. However, in some cases, where the processed document is big or/and complex. the droplet returns control to the script before the report is written and the document is moved to the "success" or "failure" folder. The consequence is that the process continues, but without the moved file, it eventually fails.
The workaround so far has been to add a delay after those droplet calls. This does help, but it is a waste of time for small documents, and there will always be a document big and complex enough to take longer than the delay.
We also found out that the time needed for finishing writing the report and moving the document depends on the speed of the system (had to be expected…).
The workaround would be to calculate the delay from the document size, its number of pages, and a machine-dependent parameter. Document size, and number of pages are no big deal; they can be retrieved in the Applescript.
The problem is the machine-dependent parameter, which can be determined experimentally. But how do I make that parameter available to all the scripts needing it?
Incorporating it into the scripts is not an option, because we have a number of systems installed, and if we would do that, we'd end up in a maintenance nightmare. Passing it as an argument in the initial system call is also not possible, because the calls are many, and again would lead to a maintenance nightmare.
So, is there a way to set up a place where that machine parameter can be stored and easily called from any Applescript, no matter how it itself is called.
Thanks a lot for your advice.
You might find the Property List Suite in System Events useful. It’s a standard means of storing and then retrieving such information. Property List files themselves are simply XML files, so you can even create them outside of AppleScript and then read them within your scripts.
There’s a description with examples at https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/58007/how-do-i-pass-variables-values-between-subsequent-applescript-runs-persistent
A simple suggestion if you only have one paramater to keep track of would be to just have a text file in a known location on each machine. The only content of the text file would be the machine paramater. I like to use the Application Support folder this kind of thing.
Assuming your machine parameter is CPU speed. You can save a text file in /Library/Application Support/Preflight Scripts/machinecpu.txt with the contents:
2.4
Then in Applescript, you would just read the text file.:
set machineParam to read file "Macintosh HD:Library:Application Support:Preflight Scripts:machinecpu.txt"
I have an applescript xcode project in xcode 3.2 and am trying to change the system volume...however it doesn't work...it either stops the nstimer or doesnt do anything at all...
Is there a way to log the errors so that I can pinpoint the issue?
Here is my code
set newVolume to 50
set volume output volume newVolume
textName's setStringValue_(currentVolume)
set currentVolume to newVolume
obv this is a much more condense version but this literally does not work...it is inside of an NSTimer but, even when not within an NSTimer it still does not work...newVolume, currentVolume, and textName are all declared...do I need to declare something for the set volume line?
So, your actual question was simply how to log errors from AppleScriptObjC:
AppleScriptObjC will log any errors thrown in your script to the console -- just look in the bottom pane in Xcode. For instance, in your case you should see something like “«script» doesn’t understand the «aevtstvl» message.” (This isn’t terribly clear, but it’s telling you that your script sent a set volume command to a script object, which didn’t have a handler for it.) If you want to capture and log errors yourself, you can put troublesome sections inside a try/on error block, and deal with it yourself in the error handler.
If you’re feeling extra inquisitive, you can also turn on the NSScriptingDebugLogLevel preference, like this:
defaults write com.me.myapp NSScriptingDebugLogLevel 1
...and AppleScriptObjC will log information about every message sent either way across the bridge. (Set it to 0 or use defaults delete to turn it off.)
That’s error logging. Now, what you didn’t actually ask, but I’m going to answer anyway, was “How do I fix my set volume command?”
Short version: add tell current application to:
tell current application to set volume output volume 50
And yes, the range for the “new” volume parameters is 0 to 100. The old compatibility one goes from 0 to 7. (Why? The old Control Panel volume slider had 8 stops.)
Long version:
There’s a bad interaction between the default direct parameter and set volume’s handling of it. When using AppleScriptObjC, “it”, and therefore the default direct parameter, unless you say otherwise, is the current script, and set volume chokes on that. You can force “it” to be nothing by saying tell current application to. (Alternatively, you could give it an explicit direct parameter by using the old-fashioned form set volume x where x is a real number from 0 to 7. However, this doesn’t match the numbers you get from get volume settings, only lets you set the output volume, and doesn’t let you set things like “muted” correctly.)
And by the way, if your AppleScriptObjC project is sufficiently simple (in particular, if you don’t need any interface), you can write it directly in AppleScript Editor: choose File > New from Template > Cocoa-AppleScript Applet, and use the normal AppleScript on run and on open handlers, except that you can now also invoke anything from Cocoa.