Creating new flat file using TextEdit w/specified name and path

Question

Hi all,
I am working on an Applescript to create a blank new plain text file (in /tmp with a unique filename derived from today's date and time) and am missing something 'cause I keep getting an error message.
Here's the code:
<pre class=command>
set Today to (do shell script "/bin/date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S") as string
set DefaultFilename to (Today & "TMP.txt") as text
set TMPpath to "/tmp/" as text
set TMPFile to (TMPpath & DefaultFilename)
tell application "TextEdit"
set NewDoc to make new document with properties {name:DefaultFilename, path:TMPpath}
end tell
</pre>
When I run the above code snippet I get the Applescript error message:
TextEdit got an error: NSArgumentsWrongScriptError
I understand that the properties listed in the make command should be a record, and that the individual properties comprising the record should each be text.
What am I missing here? Something obvious I suspect.
Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!
Ed

Answer 1

You're trying to use Unix-style paths for a Cocoa app, and that won't work.
You need to use Mac-style paths, that is, colon-delimited, not unix-style (slash-delimited) paths.
<pre class=command> set Today to (do shell script "/bin/date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S") as string
set DefaultFilename to (Today & "TMP.txt") as text
set TMPpath to ":private:tmp:" as text
set TMPFile to (TMPpath & DefaultFilename)
tell application "TextEdit"
set NewDoc to make new document with properties {name:DefaultFilename, path:TMPpath}
end tell</pre>
A slightly better solution is to use the path to command rather than a hard-coded path. path to temporary items will give you the path to the current OS temporary file directory, which is more reliable than hard-coded strings, especially since non-English versions of the OS mght not use the same path names.
<pre class=command> set TMPpath to path to temporary items as text</pre>