Force Logout without "Do you want to save?" Prompt

Question

Hi,
I am new to Applescript, and have been trying to learn as much as I can.  Most of it makes sense, but I'm having a few issues with a particular task.  I've been asked to come up with a way to essentially log out a user after 30 minutes of inactivity.  That part's not really an issue, but when it comes to actually logging the user out, I run into a problem if the user has any open, unsaved documents opened.
This forces the "Do you want to save changes?" dialog box to appear, which - if left unanswered - ends up causing the log out process to timeout.  I suppose what I'm wondering is if there's any way to force close all programs/open documents/etc. with no prompt to save and log off.  Other sites and forums mentioned using Unix commands, but I'm not that familiar with them (and most "do shell script ..." and some variation of "killall" still brought up the same user prompt about saving).
I totally understand the reason behind prompting users about that, but I'm just trying to figure out if this is possible.  Any hints, tips, or advice really would be appreciated.
Thanks!

Answer 1

Your problem here is that it may depend on the applications in use.
All applications should understand the 'quit' event, so you can tell them to quit. Most of them should also accept the optional 'saving' parameter to tell them whether or not to save open documents, but there's no guarantee of that.
In addition, recent applications that support versions and resume shouldn't prompt at all - they should save their current state and just restore that state next time they're launched.
So, since there are multiple cases that require different actions, your first problem is going to be categorizing applications so that you know what actions to take. Given that you likely can't predict all the applications that will be running, that's going to be hard to do.
I might be over-thinking it though, so let's simplify:
First, it's easy to get a list of running apps:
tell application "System Events"
          set runningApps to every application process whose background only is false
end tell
From here it's easy to iterate through them, first trying the 'safe' option of not saving changes. Here I'm using a 'try' block to catch errors (e.g. the application doesn't understand the 'saving' parameter), at which point I can re-try the quit without the parameter:
repeat with eachApp in runningApps
          try
                    tell application eachApp to quit saving no
          on error
                    try
                              tell application eachApp to quit
                    end try
          end try
end repeat
So, in essence, this will iterate through the runningApps. It first tries to tell the application to quit with the 'saving no' option. If that fails it then re-tries without the 'saving' option.
This should be enough to quit most apps, after which you can issue the log out command.
If you have applications that support versions and restore you could put them in an exceptions list, knowing that when they're told to quit they'll save state, so you don't need to interact with them