More snippets from my adventures with @AlfredApp and AppleScript.  For this one, I needed to fulfill a couple of requirements, similar in nature to my previous e-mail code:

1. Most importantly I needed to figure out a way to utilize a single string entry into Alfred that could be interpreted with multiple variables.  Example:  Triggering alfred and typing trigger Severity-Subject-Context producing three distinct variables within an AppleScript:

1. Severity
2. Subject
3. Context

I had to use AppleScript because passing the arguments was dependent upon the AppleScript library references, so just popping a shell script wasn’t fully the answer

Finally, I needed to grab those values and then create three different e-mails directed to three different parties with (you should probably see where I’m going with this) three different contexts (this was the easiest part).

The hardest part about all of this is dealing with Alfred’s input scheme.  As far as I can tell (and even using @preppeller’s own Tumblr) it seems that there’s no easy way to differentiate a single Alfred string to multiple variables.  In that Tumblr piece, Preppeller shows off the following code snippet:

on alfred_script(q)
  tell application "Things"
    parse quicksilver input q
  end tell
end alfred_script

This would be great if it weren’t for the fact that instead of Alfred handling the variables of the input, he’s turning to @CulturedCode’s Things App and its ability to parse out syntax provided.  In my situation unfortunately, @SparrowApp doesn’t have that ability and it’s what I needed (I blame neither party!).  Another good example actually got to me from the team itself while writing this blog, take a look for how he handled it using a shell script.

So putting around, I decided I was going to use AppleScripts “do shell script” to parse out the line using sed and a relatively complex regex.  I’m sure I could do this much, much better some other way, but this is how I did it!  I figured that since it took me a bit of time, I could help others by providing my tools.  I’m not going to link anything for a bit, but please see links at the bottom of the post for some of the tools and resources I tapped into.  More after the break. Continue reading →