Getting help

ASDictionary

ASDictionary, available from the appscript website's tools page, provides a convenient GUI interface for exporting application terminology resources in plain text and HTML formats. ASDictionary can export HTML dictionaries in both single-file and frame-based formats.

Keyword conversion

[caution: keyword conversion rules are not yet finalized, so this might change]

Because application terminology resources specify AppleScript-style keywords for class, property, command, etc. names, NodeAutomation uses the following rules to translate these keywords to legal JS identifiers:

• Characters a-z, A-Z, 0-9 and underscores (_) are preserved.

• Spaces, hyphens (-) and forward slashes (/) are removed, and the following word capitalized (e.g. document files → documentFiles).

• Ampersands (&) are replaced by the word And.

• All other characters are converted to 0x00-style hexadecimal representations surrounded by underscores.

• Names that match standard JS value/function names or names already used by NodeAutomation have an underscore appended.

• If the first character is uppercase, this is currently preserved, e.g. RGB color → RGBColor. [TO DO: this rule should probably change to match standard JS naming conventions, e.g. rgbColor, as linters will complain about a leading uppercase char in a non-class name]

• Names that match the following names [TBC] reserved by nodeautomation have an underscore appended:

  at                and
  named             or
  ID                not
  previous          customRoot
  next              launch
  slice             isRunning
  thru              property
  where             elements
  first             sendAppleEvent
  middle            help
  last              asType
  any               sendOptions
  every             withTimeout
  beginning         ignoring
  end               toString
  before            valueOf
  after             constructor
  lt                isSpecifier
  le                isKeyword
  eq                fromTypeCode
  ne                fromEnumCode
  gt
  ge
  beginsWith
  endsWith
  contains
  isIn
  

• NodeAutomation defines default terminology for standard type classes such as integer and UnicodeText, and standard commands such as open and quit. If an application-defined name matches a built-in name but has a different Apple event code, NodeAutomation will append an underscore to the application-defined name.