2. API overview
Classes
The main AEM classes are as follows:
- Application
- Represents a scriptable application, and provides an
event
method for constructing Apple events. - Event
- Represents a ready-to-send Apple event, and provides a
send
method for sending it. Returned by theApplication
class'sevent
method. - EventError
- Represents an error raised by the target application or the Apple Event Manager.
- Codecs
- Provides
pack
andunpack
methods for converting Python values to AE types, and vice-versa. Clients usually don't need to access this class directly. - AEType, AEEnum
- Represent Apple event type and enumerator values.
In addition, there are a number of classes used to represent application references, although the user does not instantiate these directly.
Attributes
AEM exports three top-level attributes for use in constructing application references:
- app
- Base object used to construct absolute references.
- con
- Base object used to construct relative reference to container object (used in range specifiers).
- its
- Base object used to construct relative reference to object being tested (used in filter specifiers).
References are constructed from these base objects using chained property/method calls.
Modules
AEM also exports the following support modules:
- findapp
- Provides functions for locating applications by name or bundle id.
- ae
- Low-level extension that defines an
AEDesc
type representing Carbon Apple event descriptors (AEDescs). Also provides a number of support functions used by AEM, appscript and related packages. - kae
- Exports constants defined by Apple Event Manager and Open Scripting APIs.