[Brass]

I've produced an Application that uses the Address Book database. I also have a button the users can click to open the Address Book application.

This button invokes the openURL command with the URL, "addressbook://".

This works well most of the time, however, if the Address Book application is already open, but it's window is closed or minimised, it's not of much use. The Address Book application is still brought to the front, but the window does not appear (remains closed/minimised). So it' s really quite useless in that situation. In fact the users sometimes don't even notice that the menubar has changed to Address Book.

I've tried using AppleScript events to activate address book, but that has the same result.

Is there any way I can activate the Address Book's window to either open it or un-minimise it?

[macmike42]

In AppleScript, instead of using the keyword "activate", use the keyword "reopen". There is an AppleEvent code for "reopen", I just can't remember what it is offhand. So if you don't want the overhead of loading the AppleScript libraries in your application, you can use plain AppleEvents.

[Brass]

Excellent! That works for closed and minimised Address Book windows!

Just takes one line of Objective C code (plus 2 variable declarations).

Very neat.

Still need another line to bring it to the front (either "activate" or use the original URL method with "addressbook://").

Thanks for your help!

[Brass]

Of course another solution is to invoke the URL:

"addressbook://<recID>?edit"

Where <recID> is the ID of an Address Book record. Of course, this isn't very helpful if you don't want to invoke edit mode in the Address Book.