[Pythonmac-SIG] [ann] appscript 0.20.2

has hengist.podd at virgin.net
Sat Nov 21 08:41:05 CET 2009


On 18 Nov 2009, at 19:45, ken manheimer wrote:

> hi.  a while back i posted about an appscript CommandError timeout i encounter at high command interaction counts.  not surprisingly, the problem (i'll reiterate the details below) still happens in 0.20.2.  i'm wondering if you (or any of the other appscript developers) have any thoughts about this?  it might be an apple events problem (eg, http://db.tidbits.com/article/10643, except i was seeing the problem in 10.5 leopard and not just snow leopard), or a problem with my machine, but the 2^16 limit happens always, and sometimes the machine gets in a state where it happens much sooner.

Testing on 10.5.8 here doesn't throw up any errors. Have you tried it with a different application? Have you tried it with AppleScript?


> here are the details:
> 
> the behavior is an appscript.reference.CommandError timeout after some number of appscript transactions.  there seems to be a hard limit just before 2**16 (65536) commands (actually, at 65529 commands, 

The auto-incrementing return ID is global to the system, so if other apps send events, that will also increment the counter. And since the counter is probably non-zero on your first run, you'll need to run your script several times, ignoring the result from the first run as that will almost certainly be artificially low.


> while i'm curious about the reason for the high hard limit, the reduced limits are actually a problem - even the 57000/58000 ceiling interferes with my script operation when running against a lot of playlists and tracks (88/9300), to the point that i've had to include kludgy measures to work around the problem.

I'd recommend reading the optimisation chapter of the appscript manual - many commands can operate on multiple objects at once, which will reduce the number of events sent and generally speed things up. That won't solve the problem - the 10.6 timeout bug is an Apple problem (which they've still not fixed in 10.6.2; I suggest folks file lots of radar reports on this issue to make Apple aware that it's a serious problem). 

The only other thing I can suggest is to monkey-patch the aem.Application._createproc function (or possibly even code a permanent workaround into ae.c itself) so that any time the Apple Event Manager's AECreateAppleEvent function returns a new event with the known-to-be-bad return ID, it chucks it and asks for a fresh one. I really don't have time to work on this right now, but if anyone else wants to have a go and submit a patch they'd be welcome to.

HTH

has
-- 
Control AppleScriptable applications from Python, Ruby and ObjC:
http://appscript.sourceforge.net



More information about the Pythonmac-SIG mailing list