Automator Open Finder Items Won't Work in Plug-In

I'm having another Automator problem in Leopard.
This time I have a workflow that is intended to combine PDFs selected in Finder and open the resulting document in Preview. The steps are:
1. Get Selected Items
2. Combine PDF Pages, Combine by appending pages
3. Open Finder Items, Open with Preview
The workflow runs fine if I'm running it from within Automator. When I save it as a plug-in, the Open Finder Items portion doesn't work. If I turn on Show this Action, I get a dialog box with a dropdown list of programs with Preview already selected along with Cancel and Continue buttons. Clicking the Continue button does nothing.
As a test, I tried removing the Combine PDF Pages step from the workflow and saving it as a plug-in. My expectation is that this version would simply open the items selected in Finder. Unfortunately, that didn't work either.
Anyone have a clue for me?

I'm having a similar problem. When running from within Automator everything is fin, but the plug in doesn't get the finder items. Oddly, I have ONE old workflow that takes the word "folder" away from a file name. That one works fine, but doesn't require any action once I select it. It doesn't even open the automator show action dialog window to make any changes. Weird how this one is still working and the other ones won't.

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Open finder items automator

Hi,
I have an automator service that uses Open Finder Items as part of the workflow. This works fine except if the app I want to use is not in my Applications folder. How can I make it so that my workflow can find my app in any location I keep it? I see the option New Variable but didn't quite figure out how to use it. I was also thinking to maybe use Applescript as part of my workflow but again couldn't figure it out. Any help would be great I'm sure there must be a way. Thanks!
rc

I'm having a similar problem. When running from within Automator everything is fin, but the plug in doesn't get the finder items. Oddly, I have ONE old workflow that takes the word "folder" away from a file name. That one works fine, but doesn't require any action once I select it. It doesn't even open the automator show action dialog window to make any changes. Weird how this one is still working and the other ones won't.

Automator (move finder items)

I have a service that moves finder items to a particular folder. Since I started using this I noticed I occasionally will need to move an item with the same name into this folder. Is there a way I can get the service to move the second item with the same name, but instead of overwriting the first item, have it add a -1 or something? If I open something like a zip file multiple times in finder, it creates the second one with a 1 after the name. That's exactly what I need. Any way to do that with a service like this?

No, I didn't give up on the thread, I just went to work with what you gave me to see what I could do with it. It's just that you've been nothing but extremely helpful and patient with me in the past; and I started to feel like I was coming to the board, putting up my problems, and you do everything for me. I know you're here to contribute to the community, but I don't like to take advantage. I am making an effort to learn this stuff now, I just have to make baby steps!
Okay, here is the deal with this item. I actually want to apply this with more than one operation, but the basic script or concept would remain pretty much the same. We create lots of documents like invoices, receipts, shipping labels, etc., that usually get saved as pdf onto the desktop. Then, they are named, often with the date and particular file name and finally moved into the proper folders. For example, shipping labels get saved to desktop with the default name of something like
vty3RlsIK.LabelGenerationServlet.part
Then I would change the name to something like
12-31-2009USPSLabel.pdf
Then, I would move it to the folder where we keep the shipping labels for records.
So, the service I created actually does more than just moving the file. It goes like this:
service receives selected pdf
in finder
name single item in finder item names (to: USPS_Label.pdf)
add date or time to finder item names (before name, underscore separator)
move finder items (to target folder)
open finder item (with default application)
The other ones I need would be similar, except they don't usually need to be opened afterward, just named and moved, for the most part. I figured I could continue to just use the name change function of automator before running the script, but if would run faster or more efficiently if that were also part of the script, I suppose that would be better. And I would like to be able to have the numbers go up through as many as I need. If it's a matter of just adding in all the possibilities of existing names up to the number I need, that's tedious work I don't mind doing now to save on having to name all these files in the future!
Also, these files are always named differently, so the source file would need to just be selected file, not the actual name.
Finally, I tried to play with the script to name the desktop like you said, but would it be something like
set source_folder to folder (path to desktop)
or
set source_folder to (path to desktop)
I still need to learn a little more before I understand the way that works. I am so used to only using the unix path, I like the ability to use (path to desktop) that's really interesting.
I think I may have rambled a bit, but that should explain the details of what I'm trying to accomplish.
thanks

Using Variables to Open Finder Item

I have created a workflow that right now goes through the following actions:
1. Get Specified Finder Items
2. Open Finder Items (using TextEdit)
3. Watch Me Do (To Select All..Copy...Close Text Edit...Click in text input field of Safari...Paste)
What I would like to do is use some variables to determine what TextEdit File is opened. For example, I would have a text file named "Friday-FileA.rtf" and would like to have the workflow use the variable to determine what Weekday it is and open the appropriate file.
I am new to Automator and have no knowledge of AppleScript but am pretty competent with my mac. Please let me know if this is something that can be done rather easily.
Thanks in advance
Nick

say you have a file "friday-13.txt" on your desktop.
You can modify your workflow by changing the first action "get specified finder items" to:
1. get value of variable "current weekday".
2. run apple script action:
<pre style="
font-family: Monaco, 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;
font-size: 10px;
margin: 0px;
padding: 5px;
border: 1px solid #000000;
width: 720px;
color: #000000;
background-color: #ADD8E6;
overflow: auto;"
title="this text can be pasted into the Script Editor">
on run {input, parameters}
tell application "Finder"
set wday to file (input & "-13.txt" as text) of (path to desktop)
end tell
return wday
end run</pre>
You can modify that as needed.

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Automator - Filter Finder Items filtering contents of sub folders

I have an external hard drive and I want to keep my iTunes music library automatically backed up on it. I am using automator to copy my most recent files to the external (run the script once a week). I let iTunes manage all my audio files, etc so I figured the created, modified, opened dates would be the best way to filter the items I want to copy over. The workflow is as follows.
1) Get Specified Finder Items (iTunes Library Music folder)
2) Get Folder Contents (All artist directories (Repeat for each subfolder found is NOT checked)
3) Filter Finder Items (ANY of Date Last Modified, Date Created, Date last opened in the last week)
4) Copy finder items (to my external hard drive)
I am having two problems.
1) If I play a song from my second hard drive iTunes copies it into it's directory when it opens... iTunes Music > Artist > Album > Song.mp3. The mp3's modified date, created date, and last opened date is the same as the file that got copied. The new Artist and Album directories that were created by itunes have current created dates (makes sense). However, the filter is still not catching it. Only if the mp3 is current will the filter catch it. I DON'T have 'Repeat for each subfolder found'... shouldn't the filter check for the folder's modified, created and last opened dates?
2) If everything works the way I want it to I see this to be a problem in the future. If I add an album by an artist that I already have an album for, the filter will skip it. Any suggestions on how I could handle this problem?
Thanks.

Found out that since Hebrew was set up first in the language option the filter on textual was failing. After I changed the order of the languages in the language preferences the file filter by name, extension etc… worked O.K.
Nati

Automator Filter Finder Items

A very simple task, which I have attempted to figure out many times over the last few months; but my repeated attempts haven't been successful. This should be easy for someone to resolve…
I would like to strip out all the files of a certain extension (.txt) from an hierarchy of nested folders, & move them to the Trash. (Told you it was easy!)
Here's what I think ought to work:
• Create an Automator Workflow
• 'Ask for Finder Items' to select the topmost folder
• 'Get Folder Contents' with 'Repeat for each subfolder found' — (the results successfully include all the relevant files)
• 'Filter Finder Items': "find files where any of the following are true: file extension is .txt" — (I tried "txt" as well as ".txt")
• 'Move Finder Items to Trash'.
The files turn up (alongside loads of other junk) in the 'Get Folder Contents' step, & they are reported in the results; but when I try to filter out everything apart from the .txt files, so that only the .txt files remain, the filter reports no results.
So the 'Filter Finder Items' action completes with no results, & with a warning that: The action “Move Finder Items to Trash” was not supplied with the required data.
I think it must be something obvious, but I can't figure it out, & although I've searched extensively online, everyone else with similar problems has other complications which get resolved… so they lose interest just at the point where I think they're going to reveal the solution.

You need to understand the issues here. Automator was released with 10.4 (Tiger), and many of the core automator actions date from that time. This introduces forward-compatability problems: things that should work (and maybe did work) in 10.4 might not work as specified in 10.6, depending on if/how the underlying cocoa APIs have changed. Now, in the best of all possible worlds, Apple would update automator actions with each new upgrade, but it's probably not needed for the bulk of the actions, and Apple may not be aware of problems that do exist with given actions (that depends on whether people filed meaningful bug reports on them).
Don't be confused by the seeming simplicity of what I did: the Move Finder Items to Trash action probably uses cocoa file system APIs directly, whereas my applescript leverages the developed programmatic underpinnings of the Finder - the Finder has a built-in system for moving files in bulk, whereas the action is obviously moving files one at a time (which is where things are getting congested).
Filter Finder Items seems to be a simple metadata search (just another use of the spotlight framework, which hasn't changed much since its inception) so I can't see any way in which it would fail. it is, of course, limited by the same things that spotlight is limited by - it won't find material that's not indexed and may not do exactly what one always expects (e.g., may not recognize an extension as an extension unless the extension belongs to an app registered with the system) but other than that there's very little it can do wrong. As a general rule, actions that deal only with manipulating automator data (e.g. modifying references passed from one action to the next) won't break. You'll only see breakage with actions that need to access exterior frameworks that have changed significantly since the actions were created.
That's the best answer you're going to get: one can't prove a negative, so there's no way to demonstrate that FFI isn't broken. it's easy enough to check for a given task, though - just run the workflow you have on a test folder without the deleting action, check the results window, and compare it to the results you expect (which you can gather by eye in a Finder search window, through an applescript, through an app that will report the number of files of given types in a folder…).

Speakable Items won't work with my headset

Here's the deal:
When I am using the internal microphone with Speakable Items, everything works fine. (I have to lean in a bit, obviously.) But no matter what I do, my computer won't understand commands spoken through my bluetooth headset. My OS is up-to-date (10.4.10).
The headset (Plantronics Voyager 510) pairs fine with my computer, an iMac G5, and appears to work perfectly well as an input device: the readout in the Sound preference pane shows that the computer can hear my voice through it. In fact, when I go to the "Speakable Items" tab in the Speech preference pane, choose the headset (which appears as "PLT 510"), and attempt to calibrate it, the blue, green, and red readout in the Microphone Calibration window also registers my voice.
But no matter where I set the slider, no matter where I am in relation to the headset microphone, and no matter at what volume or speed I speak, the computer will not recognize commands. It can hear my voice — which I keep in the green zone — but won't understand it.
It's not just in the calibration window: it also won't work when trying to use Speakable Items in, say, the Finder. I've tried changing the input volume for the headset in the Sound preferences, having my room totally silent (including shutting off the air conditioner), calibrating with Speakable Items set to "on" and "off," and weeping and begging. I even rebooted. Nada.
Again, Speakable Items works fine when I am using the internal microphone. The one other difference I found in their behaviors is that, with the calibration slider set to low and the room silent, the internal microphone is steady at the second green bar; but the headset under the same conditions is steady at the sixth bar. In fact, in the case of the headset, moving the slider has no effect at all: it always rests on the sixth bar.
(In other news, the headset won't pair with my iBook G3 [Dual-USB] using the D-Link DBT-120 [Rev. B3]. But I guess that's a different issue altogether.)
Googling, I see plenty of happy Mac users who own my model of headset, but I can't find this problem addressed anywhere. I've looked through the forums here as well.
Thanks for reading! Can anyone help?

Sorry for the slow reply, Philip!
First of all, Macs do not yet interact in stereo with Bluetooth headsets, though according to rumour this will be available in Leopard (along with everything else).
Have you tried using the Skype Test Call feature? This is one of the easiest ways of listening back to what you record. Come to that, does it record into one of the more standard sound apps (e.g. Garage Band, Audacity, SndSampler)?
My wife has a Plantronics 590 Bluetooth headset, but when it is interacting directly via the Mac's Bluetooth she can only get the microphone to work with Skype and the Finder. And iTunes outputs only the left-hand channel, evenly split between the two channels, and the quality is horrible. If she wants to use it for any other purpose she has to connect it via the Bluetooth 3.5 mm jack adapter plugged into the headphone socket, which cuts out the headset mike as well as the internal speakers.
Though VoiceOver does work through her headset, without using the adapter, the quality is awful and VoiceOver keeps crashing. She can, however, use it for Speakable Items, though she often has to repeat herself. The calibration had to be set very high — 100% mostly.
Have you gone through the full calibration sequence, including getting all the test commands to flash?
Keep us posted!
Archie

Automator Copy Finder Items - file couldn't be saved error

I have a simple automator sequence that suddenly stopped working for no apparent reason. Copy Finder Items has started returning an error "the file xxx couldn't be saved to the folder yyy" Happens for different files and folders. Can't see anythng that's changed. Any ideas?

I'm currently having the same issue, and have had it with mulitple automator scripts on multiple computers, but it's not fixing itseltf. Anyone know what this error could be?
I've noticed that I get the above error most often after getting and then correcting permissions errors in the same workflow. Any help would be most appreciated.
Thanks!

Find Finder Items doesn't work?

I can't seem to get a basic thing to work...
Find Finder Items (Where "camerafiles" & Whose Name Contains "camera1")
View Results
Always results in ()
Have tried contains, begins with, ends with....nothing works.
The folder contains about 300 files that all start with "camera1-xxx-xxx-xxx"
Any ideas or is it just broken?
Dual Processor 1.4 Ghz Mac OS X (10.4.9)

Depends on what?
I don't understand why "where" the folder is located should make any difference. But here's the path:
Macintosh HD:Applications:4DWebSTAR:WebServer:Users:heckman:camerafiles
Spotlight doesn't let you limit your search to a specified folder. I mean, why search the whole hard drive when you know the files you want are inside a specific folder?
I tried a Cmd-F find for the files, they don't come up. I tried a Spotlight find, they don't come up. I open up the "Macintosh HD" drive from another computer on the network, do a Cmd-F find on that machine, they show up.
So I guess the issue is: why can't I find them on the local machine they are actually on? The files are definitely there.

Automator - Filter Finder Items bug?

I've only started using Automator a few months ago, but now I ran into a problem, which I think is not my fault, but is a bug in Automator.
Here's the scenario:
What I have is a Folder Action on the Downloads folder, and the following list of actions in order:
Get Finder Items: how.i.met.your.mother.s04e05.srt (this is for testing purposes)
Filter Finder Items - if ANY of the following are true:
Name contains "big.bang.theory"
Name contains "how.i.met.your.mother"
Name contains "fringe"
etc
I managed to find out that the same kind of container (here: Name) could not be used multiple times, because it gives no result in case "Any" of them are true. There is no way to test if any of these strings are present in the file name. I thought I could use this action like a function with "OR"-separated boolean parameters, but apparently that only works if I change the container type, e.g. I use Kind instead of Name. Meaning, if there is only one Name container, then it outputs the correct result (the .srt file, if the statement is true).
So, did I do something wrong, or is this really a bug in Automator? If you have an alternate suggestion on how to solve this, please don't hold it back

I have the same problem.
I am trying to select ANY of the following extentions: JPG, PNG, TIFF and I get no output. While if I only select one extention I do get the right output for the extention selected.
ANY of the following are true
               File extention          is          JPG
               File extention          is          PNG
               File extention          is          TIFF
     ~~~no results produced~~~
ANY of the following are true
               File extention          is          JPG
     ~~~001.JPG, 002.JPG, etc..~~~

Automator Print Finder Items always aborts

I have an automator script to print a document two-sided that worked in Tiger, but fails in Leopard. I recreated the script from scratch, but the Print Finder Items step works for a while and then aborts the script.
I've tried using Default Printer and a specific printer in the Print Finder Items step, but both have this problem.
Is this a known problem? Is there a known workaround?

Dale Boss wrote:
Thanks for your offer, and I'd love to take you up on it, but I can't figure out how to post the workflow. I don't see a way to attach, and using the clipboard doesn't work.
It's a duplexing script. It starts with Extract Odd&Even Pages (even) and then Print Finder Items (default printer). That second step fails. There's more to the script but that may be enough for you. If not, a hint on posting a workflow?
just write down the sequence of actions and options that you use. It shouldn't take too long. I don't know any other way of posting workflows.

Illustrator cc2014 open dialog box won't work yosemite

I have a Macbook Pro Retina 2014 with a fresh install of Yosemite and Creative Cloud, after a while, when I used the open dialog box for 4 or 5 times to open documents, that dialog box won't work anymore, I have to quit and reopen the Illustrator application, the shortcut won't work either. Is anybody got that problem before?
When I was on Mountain Lion, I never got this problem, I presume it's related to Yosemite.

Gelouis,
I believe it is a bug in CC2014, appearing when you have the Illustrator open/place dialogue set to column view and sort by date or sort by kind. You may change it to view by name or list view.
https://forums.adobe.com/message/7145022#7145022
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1723170
https://forums.adobe.com/message/7183002#7183002
Or you may get it right by changing the sort to something else.

Automator: Copy Finder Items Question

Hola,
Quick question about the Copy Finder Items action in automator: the "replace existing files" option, how is sameness determined? In other words, according to what criteria does Automator determine that two files are the same, and so eligible for replacement in the destination folder when that option is chosen? For example, would file Mydog.doc, modified 10/14/05, 230k be viewed as the same thing as Mydog.doc., modifided 2/21/06, 150k?
Cheers,
stu

As far as the Finder is concerned, the comparison is based on file name only.
It doesn't care about file size or modification date. If the name is the same the existing file will be replaced.

Automator Open Finder Items Won't Work in Plug-In

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