Defining an anchor name within my preference pane

Question

I would like enable AppleScript to reveal a particular tab within a custom preference pane I am developing, so that this works:

tell application "System Preferences" 
  reveal anchor "Foo" of pane id "com.example.preferences.Bar"
end tell

I cannot find anywhere how my preference pane would declare or specify the "Foo" anchor or associate that with any particular tab view item.

Answer 1

For anyone that comes to this question with the amount of frustration I did, I'm documenting here the steps to be able to get anchors for your custom NSPreferencePane.

The greatest hint was from @geowar:

Google GPGPreferences.searchTerms dictionary revealElementForKey for some clues… (AFAIK this isn't documented anywhere…)

I overlooked this comment the first time I came to this question, the second time I looked at the GPGPreferences.m file, more specifically the revealElementForKey method but couldn't figure out how the function actually got called.

The keyword was searchTerms.

I only realized this when I finally found this article SearchablePreferencePanes.

Steps:

1. Add a NSPrefPaneSearchParameters key to the Info.plist of your preference pane bundle with a value something like MyPreferencePane.
2. Create a file called MyPreferencePane.searchTerms in your Xcode project. The contents of this file should be a property list containing a dictionary that looks something like the one below (taken from the Sound preference pane). This will not only allow users to get a hit for your preference pane when searching for the specified terms, but it will also generate the anchors for the preference pane.
3. Implement the revealElementForKey(key: String) method in your class that inherits from NSPreferencePane. This method will be called both when the user opens the pane after searching for a term and also when calling the reveal() method for the ScriptingBridge anchor class.
4. Boom!

Enjoy life.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>effects</key>
    <dict>
        <key>localizableStrings</key>
        <array>
            <dict>
                <key>comments</key>
                <string>Localizable index words</string>
                <key>index</key>
                <string>noises, audio, hear, level, volume, louder, softer, quieter, increase, decrease, raise, lower, speaker, beep, warning, bell, ding, ring, hearing, beeping, dinging, ringing</string>
                <key>title</key>
                <string>Alerts and sound effects</string>
            </dict>
            <dict>
                <key>comments</key>
                <string>Localizable index words</string>
                <key>index</key>
                <string>audio, hear, level, volume, louder, softer, quieter, increase, decrease, raise, lower, music, speakers, hearing</string>
                <key>title</key>
                <string>Sound volume</string>
            </dict>
            <dict>
                <key>comments</key>
                <string>Localizable index words</string>
                <key>index</key>
                <string>audio, hear, level, volume, louder, softer, quieter, increase, decrease, raise, lower, quiet, silent, silence, turn off, hearing, muting</string>
                <key>title</key>
                <string>Mute the sound</string>
            </dict>
            <dict>
                <key>comments</key>
                <string>Localizable index words</string>
                <key>index</key>
                <string>menubar</string>
                <key>title</key>
                <string>Show volume in menu bar</string>
            </dict>
        </array>
    </dict>
    <key>input</key>
    <dict>
        <key>localizableStrings</key>
        <array>
            <dict>
                <key>comments</key>
                <string>Localizable index words</string>
                <key>index</key>
                <string>audio, hear, level, volume, louder, softer, quieter, increase, decrease, raise, lower, devices, sources, microphones, instruments, MIDI, record, line in, hearing, recording</string>
                <key>title</key>
                <string>Sound input</string>
            </dict>
        </array>
    </dict>
    <key>output</key>
    <dict>
        <key>localizableStrings</key>
        <array>
            <dict>
                <key>comments</key>
                <string>Localizable index words</string>
                <key>index</key>
                <string>devices, headphones, headsets, speakers, hear, balance, hearing, head phones, head sets</string>
                <key>title</key>
                <string>Sound output</string>
            </dict>
            <dict>
                <key>comments</key>
                <string>Localizable index words</string>
                <key>index</key>
                <string>airplay, speakers</string>
                <key>title</key>
                <string>AirPlay audio streaming</string>
            </dict>
        </array>
    </dict>
</dict>
</plist>

Answer 2

First you must make sure that what you are searching is an anchor and not an other type of object. Then use the script bellow to get every anchor names : (in this example get anchor of sound preferences will give "output", "input",..)

tell application "System Preferences"
activate
set current pane to pane id "com.apple.preference.sound"
get the name of every anchor of current pane
end tell