Moving from Microsoft Office VBA to AppleScript:
MacTech's Guide to Making the Transition

Page Prev and Page Next buttons at bottom of the page.

April, 2007
Page 115

The scripts made by the current Script Editor are now Data Fork-only files. The Entourage 2004 script menu can run these, but it does not retain changes in script property values when the script ends. (The old Resource Fork scripts were replaced in Script Editor 2, released with Panther OS 10.3. But Microsoft Office 2004 still has to work in Jaguar OS 10.2.8 which was still quite prevalent when Office 2004 came out and could not adopt the new Panther APIs for script menus.) This issue is expected to disappear with Entourage 2008, where it is assumed that the modern script menu APIs will be adopted, so that changes made to script property values in running Data Fork scripts as made by Script Editor will be retained.

So if you write a script that uses script properties whose values can be altered by script, as one or two of the examples below do, you have three choices: either

1) run it from the system script menu, just as you do for your Word and Excel scripts, and manage without keyboard shortcuts, or

2) if you have Script Debugger you can still save the scripts in Resource Fork format.

3) Download Mac MVP Barry Wainwright's "Convert Script", which will convert your data-fork script into a resource-fork script using a Unix shell script. You just drop your script on it and it's converted. Here's the URL: <http://www.barryw.net/scripts/index.html>

(None of these issues apply if you save your script as an Application to be run externally.)

To run scripts from Entourage's script menu, which looks just like the system one but is on the left side of the menu bar just to the right of the Help menu, put your scripts here: ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Entourage Script Menu Items/ folder (where ~/ means your user folder). They then appear as menu items in the Entourage script menu.

Email: Reply with Insertion Reversed

Here's a script that lets you flip your Reply style and signature placement from top to bottom, or vice-versa, on a per-message basis. I use it several times a day myself. People send you email replies where they may reply at the top, or may reply at the bottom. Nothing is messier than a chain of replies where the writers switch from one to the other, ruining the continuity. But in the meantime you have chosen your preferred method in the Entourage preferences – you can't flip-flop the preferences continually. So, if you want to sometimes reply in the opposite manner to your regular preference, just run this script.

But, first you have to set it up. This is done by setting the properties at the top. Don't worry – you will be able to do so. In the version of this script available at <http://macscripter.net> you set these properties by running a separate PREFS script, which uses the standard scripting addition commands load script and store script to change the values of the properties in the main script.

However: a) that won't work (in Entourage 2004) with your scripts made by Script Editor (see above) – the copies at macscripter.net are resource-fork scripts made in Script Debugger and b) you're a scripter, not a regular user, so you can just set the properties how you like in Script Editor, and they will work. (If you ever want to change them in the future, just open the script in Script Editor, change them, and save.)

You can add a keyboard shortcut to the script name, which is particularly handy for this script, and put it in the Entourage script menu. Here are the four properties to go at the top of the script:

property replyUsingMessageFormat : true

property htmlText : true

property attributionStyle : "short headers" -- or "internet" or "none"

property insertionPointOnTop : false --(only applies to internet-style)

The first two properties, replyUsingMessageFormat and htmlText, are for indicating whether you want to reply in the same format (i.e., Plain Text or HTML) as the original message, or whether you always want to reply in one or the other. This should be the same as you set it in the Entourage "Compose" preferences: AppleScript cannot access those preferences so you need to set them here.

If you set replyUsingMessageFormat to true, then also set htmlText to true. If you set replyUsingMessageFormat to false, set htmlText to whichever you want (false if you want Plain Text always). If your usual attribution style in the Entourage Reply Preferences is to "Place reply [quoted] text at top of message and use this attribution line" (i.e., reply at bottom) and for the script you want the opposite format of "Place reply at top of message and include From, Date, To and Subject lines" (i.e., reply at top with signature at top), set attributionStyle to "short headers".

On the other hand, if your usual attribution style is "Place reply at top of message and include From, Date, To and Subject lines" (i.e., reply at top), to do the opposite in the script set attributionStyle to "internet". (Or to "none", if that's what you want for the script.) In the second case – attributionStyle set to "internet" – you can also choose whether to set insertionPointOnTop to true (which means you'd be replying at the top: this is the way to get both the "internet" attribution plus reply-at-top, but it still places the signature at the very bottom, so is probably not what you want) or false (so reply at bottom). Naturally whatever text comes after the double-dashes ( -- ) is just comment and not code.

Here is the whole script when compiled, with the default property values chosen:

property replyUsingMessageFormat : true

property htmlText : true

property attributionStyle : "short headers"

-- or "internet" or "none"

property insertionPointOnTop : false

-- (only applies to internet-style attribution)

tell application "Microsoft Entourage"