After that we can retrieve the file specification of any item, barring some weird errors that I couldn't fix. But file specs are simple objects without any real info other than a path. You can then use info for {file specification} to retrieve a record of some of the Finder info for a file. Unfortunately, info for folders is different than info for files, and if you try to retrieve an record item with the wrong key, you get an error that you need to catch.

There is one more problem with the file info record. It has a folder attribute that is true if the file is a folder -- and an Application Frame- work is a folder, though that's not the problem I was referring to. If you try to retrieve the folder attribute in a tell application "Finder" block, AppleScript asks the Finder to get the folder of file info which is an error. I couldn't get around this by somehow signifying that folder is an attribute. So I made it into a subroutine:

on addIsFolderAttribute(l_record)
  if (class of l_record is record) then
    
    -- Add isFolder attribute so we can refer to it instead of folder
    set l_return to l_record & {isFolder:(folder of l_record)}
    
    -- Add dummy file type if there is none
    try
      file type of l_return
    on error l_error
      set l_return to l_return & {file type:false}
    end try
    
    -- Check to see if this an application, in which case treat it as a non-folder
    if (name of l_return ends with ".app") then
      set isFolder of l_return to false
    end if
    
    return l_return
  else
    return l_record
  end if
end addIsFolderAttribute

The above simple handler does some useful things. First it copies the folder attribute to isFolder, so I can query it from a tell Finder block. It also adds file type to folder file info records, so I don't have to test separately for that. And it sets isFolder to false if this is an Application Framework. The only problem here is that I can only tell that this is an Application Framework because it ends with ".app", none of the file info record attributes give me a clue.

So with file specs and file info records, I can do almost everything that I could do with Finder objects. And now I can copy Application Frameworks. At this point I hope that Synchronize Folder works with just every file type and is generic enough to do the job. But only more testing will tell. One thing I want to add is specifying the time error for date comparisons. That way if the modification dates differ by only a few seconds it won't copy the file. For some reason all the files I Finder copied have a modification date a couple of seconds after the original files. I guess Finder copy is not quite right all the time, which is annoying if you're comparing exact times.

This AppleScript is still a long way away from being good enough to release, but I've made a lot of progress this week. From nothing to something that should work fine as is, though without a lot of bells and whistles. I hear that Mac OS X 10.1 has better AppleScript support and perhaps the Application Framework issue that I encountered is fixed there (though it's probably not a bug). I'll have a chance to test it out when I install it this weekend, as my 10.1 upgrade package finally arrived. Hooray!