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Automator Open Finder Items Won't Work in Plug-In

I'm having another Automator problem in Leopard.

This time I have a workflow that is intended to combine PDFs selected in Finder and open the resulting document in Preview. The steps are:

1. Get Selected Items
2. Combine PDF Pages, Combine by appending pages
3. Open Finder Items, Open with Preview

The workflow runs fine if I'm running it from within Automator. When I save it as a plug-in, the Open Finder Items portion doesn't work. If I turn on Show this Action, I get a dialog box with a dropdown list of programs with Preview already selected along with Cancel and Continue buttons. Clicking the Continue button does nothing.

As a test, I tried removing the Combine PDF Pages step from the workflow and saving it as a plug-in. My expectation is that this version would simply open the items selected in Finder. Unfortunately, that didn't work either.

Anyone have a clue for me?

BlacBook 2Ghz Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 250GB HDD, Mac OS X (10.5)

Posted on Nov 17, 2007 10:57 AM

Reply
4 replies

Nov 21, 2007 9:50 AM in response to Steven Hovland

I'm having a similar problem. When running from within Automator everything is fin, but the plug in doesn't get the finder items. Oddly, I have ONE old workflow that takes the word "folder" away from a file name. That one works fine, but doesn't require any action once I select it. It doesn't even open the automator show action dialog window to make any changes. Weird how this one is still working and the other ones won't.

Feb 7, 2008 6:46 PM in response to Steven Hovland

Well, I just found the answer to this!!!

It seems that Automator "implicitly" adds the "Get Selected Finder Items" to the beginning of a workflow, so when I removed that action, the workflow worked as expected.

Also, I added a "Sort Finder Items" to the action. This allows me to control the order in which the documents get combined.

Over and out.

Automator Open Finder Items Won't Work in Plug-In

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