Legacy Document

Inside Macintosh: Interapplication Communication /

Chapter 3 - Introduction to Apple Events / About the Apple Event Manager

Supporting Apple Event Recording

If you make your application scriptable, you may also want to make it recordable. Users of recordable applications can record their actions in the form of Apple events that a scripting component translates into a script. When a user executes a recorded script, the scripting component sends the same Apple events to the application in which they were recorded.

To make your application recordable, you should use Apple events to report user actions to the Apple Event Manager in terms of Apple events. One way to do this is to separate the code that implements your application's user interface from the code that actually performs work when the user manipulates the interface. This is called factoring your application. A factored application acts as both the client and server application for Apple events it sends to itself in response to user actions. When recording is turned on, the Apple Event Manager sends a copy of every event than an application sends to itself to the scripting component or other process that turned recording on.

The chapter "Introduction to Scripting" in this book provides an overview of how to make your application both scriptable and recordable. The chapter "Recording Apple Events" describes how to factor your application for recording and explains the Apple Event Manager's recording mechanism.