Noodlesoft Forums

Hi --

I'm trying to automate the processing of a large number of PDF files using PDFPenPro. On occasion one of the PDF files appears corrupt, and the AppleScript that is automating PDFPenPro times out because a dialog box is visible in the app ("This file appears to be corrupt..." etc). Unfortunately this then appears to stall out subsequent processing of valid PDFs.

Is there a recommended best practice for defining, detecting and handling exception cases like this in Hazel? I know how to recognize the situation in AppleScript using something like this (using Preview instead of PDFPenPro):

Code: Select all

try
   tell application "Preview"
      with timeout of 5 seconds
         open file "Harddisk:Users:username:Documents:mypdfs:example.pdf"
      end timeout
      quit
   end tell
on error errmsg number errNum
   if errNum is -1728 then
      display dialog "Hey, that file doesn't exist!" buttons {"Doh!"}
   else
      -- how should I recover from the error here
      display dialog errmsg buttons {"Oops"}
   end if
end try

But I'm not sure how to recover elegantly in the error handling code. I'd like to just e.g. move this file to a separate folder for future review, but then somehow dismiss the error dialog box in the app and/or quit the app so Hazel processing can continue. Is there a best practice or design pattern for doing this in Hazel automation?

Thanks,

Ramon

You should throw an error. Hazel will interpret that as the script failing and will try the rule again later.