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

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April, 2007
Page 131

Also note that we need to escape literal double quotes with the \ backslash in AppleScript, i.e., \". So when concatenating literal quotes to a variable representing text, namely dName here, that comes out as "\"" & dName & "\"". In the script the final (outer) closing quote is of course withheld until the rest of the literal text ( <) before the next concatenation has been added: "\"" & dName & "\" <".

We then check to see whether the email address eAddress has already been added to the list of entryAddresses: we do not want duplications. We do it this way (checking for eAddress rather than nameAddress) because we don't care if a previous instance did or did not include some version or other of the display name: we do not want to duplicate messages to this person every time in future even if the current message did so.

If we do not see the email address already in the entryAddresses list, we proceed to make a new group entry at (in) the group and add the email address to the list now. (Note how we

set end of entryAddresses to eAddress

That is the best and most efficient way to add a new item to a list in AppleScript, and you should always use it. Concatenating a new-single-item list to the existing list is much slower: it forces AppleScript to make a new copy of the list in memory and to iterate the list as well. Similarly using copy eAddress to end of entryAddresses is less efficient for the same reason.)

Important Tip! Now we come to the most peculiar part of this script, something you should remember or file away should you ever work with groups again. If you look at the dictionary entry for group entry in the Entourage Contact Suite you will see it has the following structure:

group entry n, pl group entries : every group entry

elements

contained by groups.

properties

content (address, r/o) : address of entry

See the "type" for its sole content property: address class. That's the same class I just referred to a couple of paragraphs ago. If you click the link to it in Script Editor, it takes you there:

address n, pl addresses : every address

elements

contained by application.

properties

display name (Unicode text) : the name used for display

address (string) : the e-mail address

That's the odd address class with the two properties address and display name once again. And if you go to the trouble to

get content of every group entry of group "Group Name"

using the name of any existing group you have, you will see that in fact the content of each entry does in fact have the record structure of

{address:"jblow@aol.com", display name:"Joe Blow"}

Therefore when preparing to make a new group entry at our new group, surely the syntax ought to be:

make new group entry at theGroup ¬

     with properties {content:{address:eAddress, display name:dName}}

rather than:

make new group entry at theGroup ¬

     with properties {content:nameAddress}

where we went to all that trouble to make nameAddress text in this format:

set nameAddress to "\"" & dName & "\" <" & eAddress & ">"