Inconsistent behavior from "Display webpages" acti

I have put together an Automator workflow to pull all the links to articles from today’s New York Times and display them in tabs of a DEVONagent window. It’s lovely (and I’ve added a little Perl script to change all the desired URLs to printable pages, which makes them perfect for quickly importing into DEVONthink as I scan through the tabs).

However, the behavior of the “Display webpages” action is inconsistent. Probably 60% of the time it does not in fact open tabs for all the URLs it is passed (this can be a large number, up to 50 or so). It may open as few as 6 and then stop, apparently without returning an error of any kind. The remaining 40% of the time it opens all the URLs into tabs just fine.

I suppose that I’m asking a lot of DA by throwing it so many URLs at once, presumably via AppleEvents, which have always seemed a bit prone to getting lost when there’s a lot going on in the system.

Is there any way to fix this? Or is there a way to do a fairly simple workaround? Maybe I should write an AppleScript to pass the URLs one by one with a few seconds’ delay in between them, but I’d rather just give it the whole list of URLs and expect it to work every time.

Many thanks–

Andy

Hello Andy,

During testing I threw a lot of stuff at it and it seemed to hold out fine. Since Automator doesn’t have a good logging system, you may check the Console for more information.

Annard

Hi Annard,

Nothing in the console log that I can tell. I ended up just sending individual open events via a Perl script, which seems to be working fine.

Andy