From: Dave Howell <groups@...>
Date: 2005-09-27T08:32:43+09:00
Subject: RubyAEOSA improvements, esp. for iTunes.

Trying to do things faster than they can go with AppleScript and iTunes 
by using Ruby, but found that a lot of the information about a track 
doesn't get translated when going through to_rbobj.

In particular, the file track's "location" (a file alias) and "date 
played" and "date added" (dates) came through in unusable form.

I've pasted my fix below. to_rbobj for TypeAlias now returns a File 
object, since the whole point of an Alias is that it tracks a file via 
its inode, not its name or path. Hopefully a File object will behave 
similarly. TypeLongDateTime now comes back as a Date object.

There was also the problem of fields that in AppleScript would contain 
"missing value," which appears in RubyAEOSA as an AEDesc with type 
"TypeType" and value "msng." I just sort of attached a solution with 
chewing-gum for that case, because I don't understand what a TypeType 
record actually is. iTunes track properties that would be "missing 
data" will read in Ruby as "nil".

module OSX
	class AEDesc
		require 'date'

     	def to_file
     		d = to_path
     		File.new(d)
     	end

     	def to_date
       	d = coerce(TypeLongDateTime)
     	   	Date.new(1904, 1, 1) + Date.time_to_day_fraction(0, 0, 
d.rawdata.unpack('q')[0])
     	end

     	def to_type
       		d = rawdata
			if d == 'msng' then nil else d end
     	end

	    def to_rbobj
   	   		case __typestr__
    	   			when TypeBoolean, TypeTrue, TypeFalse then to_bool
    	   			when TypeChar, TypeUnicodeText, TypeStyledUnicodeText, 
TypeUTF8Text,
				  TypeEncodedString, TypeCString, TypePString then to_s
    	   			when TypeKeyword, TypeApplSignature then rawdata
    	   			when TypeFSS, TypeFSRef then to_path
    	   			when TypeAlias then to_file
    	   			when TypeShortInteger, TypeInteger, TypeMagnitude then to_i
    	   			when TypeShortFloat, TypeFloat, TypeExtended then to_f
    	   			when TypeAEList then to_a
    	   			when TypeAERecord then to_hash
       			when TypeLongDateTime then to_date
       			when TypeNull then nil
				when TypeType then to_type
				else self
       		end
     	end
	end
end