Tag Archives: Scripting

Reliable record references when AppleScripting FileMaker

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Using current record when AppleScripting FileMaker has a couple of problems. The current record can change out from under you, so by the next step in your script, you may be dealing with the wrong record. Simply storing the record result in a variable doesn’t work either because getting the result converts it to a native AppleScript list of the data from the record. Using a reference to current record suffers the same problem.

One solution is to use record IDs. I believe that record IDs are guaranteed to be static/unchanging, at least while the app is running.

To get the record ID for the current record:
set recID to ID of current record

To use the record ID later in your script:
get cell "my_field" of record ID recID

To get all record IDs for a given query:
set recordIDs to ID of every record whose cell "my_field" is "my_value"

Then access each found record by ID:
repeat with recID in recordIDs
   get cell "my_other_field" of record ID recID
end repeat

Note: The following method will also work for certain use cases since it appears to use the record ID internally as well:
set x to current record as reference

convert lines to comma separated items with tr

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If you have output that is separated by new lines, but you really want it formatted into a single line with commas as separators or maybe a space as a separator, just pipe to tr.

Here is a simple example:

kserver:~ patternbuffer$ diskutil list | grep ^/dev
/dev/disk0
/dev/disk1

If we want them separated by spaces, we could do:

kserver:~ patternbuffer$ diskutil list | grep ^/dev | tr '\n' ' '
/dev/disk0 /dev/disk1

Note that there is a newline on the end of the output, so that trailing newline is also translated. So if you don’t want it there, you’ll have to chomp it off. I use sed, but use what you like.

Here is the same as above, but with commas, with sed to remove the trailing comma.

kserver:~ patternbuffer$ diskutil list | grep ^/dev | tr '\n' ',' | sed 's/.$//'
/dev/disk0,/dev/disk1