Automator - timer or countdown to next step/action

Question

I am trying to write an automator action that gives a warning and then counts down to the next action.
This is to link in with an action I have written to automatically close and back-up my Bento database.
What I am looking for is an action in case I forget to activate that action before I quit working in the evening. The action I am looking for should pop up a message and say e.g. 'Bento will close in xxx seconds' and if no button is pressed to cancel, it will then go to the next step and close Bento.
Any suggestions?

Answer 1

The standard Wait for User Action action goes the other way (it stops the workflow), so there isn't anything handy that has a built-in counter. You can fake one with a Run AppleScript action though, by popping up dialogs with short timeouts, for example:
<pre style="
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padding: 5px;
border: 1px solid #000000;
width: 720px;
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title="this text can be pasted into an Automator 'Run AppleScript' action">
on run {input, parameters} -- countdown dialog
set WaitTime to 10 -- this is the overall time to wait
set Interval to 1 -- this is the interval between dialogs
repeat with Timer from WaitTime to 1 by -Interval
if Timer ≤ Interval then set Interval to Timer
set DialogResult to display dialog return & "Bento will close in " & Timer & ¬
" seconds..." buttons {"Cancel", "OK"} default button "OK" giving up after Interval
if (button returned of DialogResult) is "OK" then exit repeat
end repeat
return input
end run
</pre>