Writing files outside the Mac App

[Ron Zellner]

I have a stack that writes files to store the contents of fields:

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put the filename of this stack into P
Delete the last item of P
Open file P & "/" & "TimeSeq" & field "Subject" for write
etc.

works fine but when I create a standalone for Mac the files are created inside the App. I can access the contents with a right click, but that isn't too convenient. I've added a folder to the file structure and modified the path to include that folder to put the file at a different level:

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Open file P & "/DataFiles/" & "TimeSeq" & field "Subject" for write

Works fine in development, but that doesn't work in the App.

Similarly, I'm creating png files from images with:

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put (item 1 to -2 of the effective filename of this stack) & "/activity1-snapshots" & field "Subject" into tSnapshotPath
create folder tSnapshotPath

and then elsewhere:

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then export image "ImageDrawing"   of card "Activity1" to URL ("binfile:"&tSnapshotPath&"/" & the seconds & ".png") as PNG

but they also are created inside the App.
Is there a way to alter the file paths to produce files outside the App? They also need to work in the PC standalone. Separate folders would be good there too for convenient access.

(Which of these two ways of creating the file path is preferred? they seem to work equally well; the second one is more efficient.)

[Klaus]

Hi Ron,

remember that OS X applications are in fact folders with a certain structure!
Maybe this "anatomy" of an OS X Application bundle may help:

.../Folder with your standalone inside/Standalone.app/Contents/MacOS/Standalone
Where "Standalone" is the Main stack that you compiled a standalone from.

So you will have to:

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...
put the filename of this stack into we_are_here
set itemdel to "/"
if the platform = "MacOS" then
   delete item -4 to -1 of we_are_here

## Win:
## ../Folder with your standalone inside/Standalone.exe
else
   delete item -1 of we_are_here
end if
...

Now "we_are_here" contains the path of your "Folder with your standalone inside".

Hope that helps.


Best

Klaus