How to wait until an Entourage Schedule item completed

Question

I am trying to script the "Send & Receive All" operation in Entourage, and I have found that I can trigger the process off (from within my script) by:
tell application "Microsoft Entourage"
execute schedule "Send & Receive All"
end tell
However, the script continues to process while the scheduled actions take place.
Is there any way to wait until the schedule actions complete and then process the rest of the script?
Thanks
Susan

Answer 1

Glad to help, Susan
I found out about "connection in progress" by looking at the properties of "application" in the Entourage dictionary:
connection in progress boolean [r/o] -- Are there any network connections in progress?
(In fact I searched through the dictionary for the phrase "connect".) The property is a boolean (true/false), and my script uses a "repeat while" loop to test for that boolean condition.
As well as properties, the Entourage application object also has elements. These include "POP account", "IMAP account", "Exchange account" and "Hotmail account". These can be referred to "by numeric index, test". So if you pass a list of accounts to the "connect" command, Entourage will connect and download mail from those accounts. For example, if you have two POP accounts, this works:
tell application "Microsoft Entourage" to connect to {POP account 1, POP account 2}
AppleScript lists are contained in curly braces.
But it's simpler (and less prone to error) to do this:
tell application "Microsoft Entourage" to connect to every POP account
Alternatively, the "test" lets you refer to individual accounts by name - a list isn't essential, despite what the dictionary says:
tell application "Microsoft Entourage" to connect to POP account "My Account"
There's many ways of skinning a cat.
To answer your more general question, though, there is no one "user guide" for AppleScript. You can learn the about the basics of the language from the AppleScript Language Guide. But that will tell you nothing about how to script particular applications. This is because every developer, if they do implement AppleScript in their application (and lots don't), implements it in different ways.
So as well as learning AS, for each application that you want to script you have to learn a slightly different set of commands. There's an awful lot of trial and error involved, but one way to learn is to look at scripts that others have written. There are good resources at Apple's own AppleScript page and at AppleScript Central among others. For specifically scripting Entourage, try Paul Berkowitz's scripts.
Different people will also recommend different books. My recommendation is AppleScript: The Definitive Guide by Matt Neuberg, but again it's not application-specific.
Hope this helps, at least to give you some pointers.
H