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Cocoa Scripting Classes and Categories

The tables in this chapter provide brief descriptions for the listed Cocoa scripting classes. The accompanying material provides information on when your application uses these classes, as well as hints on which ones you might need to subclass.

About thirty public classes in Cocoa's Foundation framework support the basic structure of Cocoa scripting. Several methods in the Application Kit framework add scriptability features for applications, windows, documents, and text objects. Together, this provides support for the AppleScript commands listed in “Summary of AppleScript Command Support” (such as get, set, move, delete, and so on).

In many cases, Cocoa scripting creates and manipulates instances of these classes, such that your application needs only to respond when a method of a particular application object is invoked. That is, your application rarely needs to declare or instantiate any of the basic Cocoa scripting classes.

On the other hand, some applications will need to define subclasses of one or more of Cocoa scripting's command classes to provide support for operations specific to the application. Even in those cases, however, the application is not responsible for creating instances of the commands—Cocoa scripting does that, based on the scriptability information provided in the application's sdef file. The process of working with commands is described in detail in “Script Commands.”

There is one case where your application typically creates instances of Cocoa scripting classes. In object specifier methods for your scriptable classes, you'll create instances of the object specifier classes listed in Table 9-2.

Contents:

Script Commands and Scriptability Information
Object Specifiers, Logical Tests, and Related Categories
Key-Value Coding and Value Coercion
Subclasses for Standard AppleScript Commands
Manipulation of Apple Events

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