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Let's Create A Simple Alert

The easiest way to learn how to use Scriptable is by creating a simple alert.

We will make an alert where we will ask for your birth year and returns us another alert with your age!​

Create a new Script in Scriptable. To define an Alert we put it in a variable "alert".

let alert = new Alert();

// Give a title to the alert
alert.title = "What year were you born in?";

// Add a small message
alert.message = "I want to calculate your age!";

// Show the alert
alert.present();

When running your script it should show you this:

Did it work? Nice! if not? You can ask your problem in Discord or Reddit. Now we will add a textfield to the alert. We can do that by using addTextField(placeholder, value). Let's change the button because Cancel looks a bit boring =D. You can add buttons (also called actions) by using addAction(title)

To retrieve the year you have to use .then() after you've presented the alert. .then() is used when there is a promise. Index is the number of the textfield. (Always starts at 0!)

// Show an input field to get year
alert.addTextField("year", "");

// Show a button named Calculate instead of Cancel
alert.addAction("Calculate");

// Get year by using alert.present()
alert.present().then((index) => {
  // Retrieve the year by using the index from the promise
  let year = alert.textFieldValue(index);

  // Show year in the log window
  console.log(year);
});

When running your script it should show you this:

Now we will calculate your age and show it again with an Alert. To calculate your age we will use Date to get the current year instead of putting it in a variable. Because year is text it will be hard to calculate your age so we will change it to a Number with parseInt(). Create a new Alert and give it a nice title and present it.

// Get year by using alert.present()
alert.present().then((index) => {
  // Retrieve the year by using the index from the promise
  let year = alert.textFieldValue(index);

  // Show year in the log window
  console.log(year);

  // Get the current year
  let currentYear = new Date().getFullYear();

  // Calculate your age
  let age = currentYear - parseInt(year);

  // Create a new alert
  let alertAge = new Alert();

  // Give a title to the alert
  alertAge.title = "Your age is " + age;

  // Show the alert
  alertAge.present();
});

When running your script it should show you this:

You did it! Next we will learn how to create a notification!