[Req.] script for updating links in Indesign using spotlight

Question

hi,
i've got a challange, can somebody please help me?
I'm a graphic designer from holland and I work with lots of Indesign documents
whose links are missing because they are moved, so they are somewhere on our server.
I have several scripts to relink missing links but they are slow,
because they search every directory and every subdirectory. This takes a while.
The search engine from apple, spotlight, is much much faster.
So I think i have this brilliant idea, i thought of the following:
I select one missing link in the linkpanel in Indesign.
Then I start the script.
The path of the missing link is copied and trimmed to just the name of the file
The filename is then copied to the clipboard.
The script then opens the dialog window to relink the missing link.
There the name of the picture is pasted in the spotlight search engine.
There the script stops.
Click on the correct file (if there are more choises) and the relink is made.
I think this way of relinking can be much faster.
And you can also work with pre-defined clever windows (to limit the results), for example:
- one witch only shows jpg
- one witch only shows tiff
- one witch only shows pdf
I know a tiny little bit of scripting, but this one I cant figure out yet.
Can somebody give me a help please?
Kind regards, Eric
ps. I still work in CS4

Answer 1

try this,
could just test it with ID CS3 and Mac OS 10.4.11
--startpoint here is a selected graphicframe (which of course should inlude the missing link)
set myFolder to choose folder with prompt "Where to search for the missing link?" --select a mounted volume, folder ...
set tid to AppleScript's text item delimiters
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ":"
tell application "Adobe InDesign CS3"
                   set myGraphicFilePath to (file path of (item link of (item 1 of all graphics of (item 1 of selection))) as text)
end tell
set myGraphicName to text item -1 of myGraphicFilePath
set myGraphicFilePath to quoted form of POSIX path of myGraphicFilePath
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to return
set PathToAllFiles to every text item of (do shell script "mdfind -onlyin '" & quoted form of POSIX path of myFolder & "'" & space & " -name '" & myGraphicName & "'")
set PathToAllFiles to my cleanList(myGraphicName, PathToAllFiles)
repeat with i from 1 to count of PathToAllFiles
                   set theItem to (item i of PathToAllFiles)
                   if button returned of (display dialog theItem with title "Relink this file?" buttons {"OK", "Cancel", "Go on"}) is "OK" then
                                            tell application "Adobe InDesign CS3"
                                                                     relink (item link of (item 1 of all graphics of (item 1 of selection))) to POSIX file theItem
                                            end tell
                   end if
end repeat
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to tid
on cleanList(fileName, listOfFilePaths)
                   set myCleanList to {}
                   set AppleScript's text item delimiters to "/"
                   repeat with p from 1 to count of listOfFilePaths
                                            set aName to (text item -1 of (item p of listOfFilePaths))
                                            if aName is equal to fileName then set end of myCleanList to (item p of listOfFilePaths)
                   end repeat
                   return myCleanList
end cleanList
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