OSA::ObjectSpecifierList#every

  • Posted by Mike Naberezny in Ruby

    For those of you who aren’t yet on the RubyOSA list (you should be), Laurent just committed a nice new feature to OSA::ObjectSpecifierList. It’s actually been there since last week, in the form of some method_missing hackery, but we finally decided to take that out and call it #every.

    Sometimes you need to collect an attribute from every object in the specifier list. Normally, you’d do something like this:

    names = OSA.app('iCal').calendars.collect { |c| c.name }

    Symbol#to_proc fans use the convenient form:

    names = OSA.app('iCal').calendars.collect(&:name)

    Now, OSA::ObjectSpecifierList also has the #every method:

    names = OSA.app('iCal').calendars.every(:name)

    The difference is subtle but #every will fetch all of the attributes in a single Apple Event, something not possible when iterating over each item in the collection. For most purposes this is not important but it is a nice feature that could make a difference on larger collections.

    This feature is currently in the RubyOSA trunk and will appear in the next stable release (coming soon).

    Update: RubyOSA 4.0 has been released and includes this feature!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 26th, 2007 at 9:22 pm and is filed under Ruby.