Services no longer working.

[Dru Brooke-Taylor]

Am I the only person with this problem? I don't know whether it's something to do with El Capitan or Accordance 11.1, but the Accordance Services no longer work. When I try to copy and paste a citation, I get

"Automator could not run the workflow because one or more actions were not loaded."

An option appears, "Show workflow". If I click it, the workflow then appears in Finder.

 

If I click on it, Automator opens with a message,

"The action 'Get Text From Accordance' could not be loaded because it could not be located. Try reinstalling the action".

That's clearly nonsense because I've just clicked on it and Automator has just done something with it.

 

However, it also doesn't mean anything and there's no way of finding out what it is supposed to mean. I've tried to find something helpful in Automator's part of the Help file, but it's completely unhelpful. Nothing looks as though it might even fail to answer the question.

 

I suspect I'm not the only Mac User who has never been able to understand what Automator is supposed to do, how to use it, or what one might be able to use it for.

 

Can someone help please?

 

Dru Brooke-Taylor, Bristol, England.

[Joe Weaks]

This message makes it sound like the "Get Text From Accordance" action is missing from your new Accordance package. The update to 11.1 should not have removed the action from inside the application bundle. It didn't for me. The services still work on my machine.

 

​Answer these questions:

Did you have more than one copy of the Accordance app running?

Are you a beta tester?

Is your Accordance.app file stored in the usual Applications folder?

Have you restarted your machine and still have the same problem?

 

Do this:

Right click on the Accordance.app file

Select "Show Package Contents"

Navigate to folder:  Contents/Library/Automator/

Do you see the two Automator actions in there? ("Get Text From Accordance" & "View Text in Accordance")

[Dru Brooke-Taylor]

Dear Joe,

 

Very many thanks. I hadn't thought of that one. The answers to your four questions are No, No, Yes, No.  I restarted my machine and the Services work again. I had not restarted since before I upgraded to 10.1.

 

Incidentally, if the Automator actions are now inside my Accordance app, does that mean I can delete the five old ones in my own Library folder?

 

Dru

[Joe Weaks]

Dru,

 

No.

Let me explain. 

Short Answer: The items in your Library folder, which show up as Services, make use of the Actions that are stored inside the Accordance bundle.

 

The five items in your ~/Library/Services/ folder at the actual Services that are available to you. You must keep those in that folder if you want to use them. A Service is a special type of "Automator Workflow" (that's why they open up in Automator for troubleshooting). Automator workflows are built using individual "Actions", which are programming functions. Most come preinstalled with OS X, but any application can also provide additional Actions in their application bundle in order to increase functionality. That's what the two Actions do that are bundled inside of Accordance. They allow workflows to interact with Accordance.

 

You had to restart so that the registry recognized the presence of those Actions inside the Accordance app.

 

Glad you're back in business.

[Dru Brooke-Taylor]

Once again, many thanks.