[mercury049]

Greetings,
I've developed a project in Macromedia Director for the Macintosh.
I have a small problem though. There are several thousand .pdf files that are included with this software. What I've found is that I didn't have Adobe Reader installed on my Mac. When I installed it, it didn't make Adobe Reader the default for opening .pdf files. Odd, I know.
What it was doing was using "Preview" to open them. This is no good because the forms are fillable. And you cannot fill them in while using Preview. They have to be opened using Adobe Reader.
What I need to know is how can I make this happen? Is there some kind of script I could write to do it? Where does it store information like that? Anyone have any ideas?

[Brass]

Select a PDF file in the Finder. Choose "Get Info" from the "File" menu. In the Get Info window, look at the "Open With" section. Choose Adobe Reader from the popup menu, then click "Change All".

Should do the trick.

[mercury049]

Thank You, but I'm already aware of how to do that.
What I'm not aware of is how to make that change happen on the users system when they use my software. I need for that set of actions to happen without the users having to do it themselves. My client want this software to be as idiot proof as possible requiring NO interaction from the user.
I hope I'm being clear.

Thanks,
Jeff

[mercury049]

No has any ideas on this?

[Brass]

Originally Posted by mercury049

Thank You, but I'm already aware of how to do that.
What I'm not aware of is how to make that change happen on the users system when they use my software. I need for that set of actions to happen without the users having to do it themselves. My client want this software to be as idiot proof as possible requiring NO interaction from the user.
I hope I'm being clear.

Thanks,
Jeff

I don't know that answer to your question, BUT I would say that you should NOT do this in any case! Changing a user's settings for all PDF files (some of which would be unrelated to your application), without any user interaction is a baaaaaad idea, in my opinion.

I would be right peeved if all my PDF files started opening in Acrobat Reader, if I wanted them to all open in Preview.

The correct solution (and I've no idea how to acheive this with Director) would be to specify which application to open each time you open one of your PDFs. In other words, intead of you program saying, "open this PDF file" (and using whatever is the default application to do it), the program should say, "open this PDF file with Acrobat Reader".

[mercury049]

I agree with you Brass.
But the client wants it the way they do. You know how that goes.
However, I've done it again in my life. I've tried to over complicate things with XTRA's and Scripts in Director.
Just in case anyone needs to know how to do this in the future, it's really rather simple and I'll post the code here for you to see.
This is using Buddy API and plain 'ol lingo.

apploc = baFindApp("CARO")
--This tells director to find what app is associated with pdf files..don't ask my why it's
--CARO, I dunno, but that's what works. it also declares the variable "apploc" which is
--what I named it for application location. it will store the location of the program used to
--open a pdf in it.
open "Mac Hard Drive:test.pdf" with apploc
--This is a bit of Lingo that tells director to open the document you want opened with
--whatever it found to open a pdf. I've found, oddly enough when I use the baFindApp,
--even though the default for a pdf is Preview, it still finds Adobe. If for some reason your
--doesn't return the parth to adobe reader, you can instead put the path to your reader
--installation in the place of apploc. Of course you'll want to enclose it in quotes as it's a
--string.

Very simple 2 lines of code that I tried to make super complex..../sigh

Live and Learn.

Thanks Brass for your attempts to help me!