James,

Been looking forward to using the new QRecall version 2.0 event schedules to run an Action upon quitting an application. But so far I haven't been able to do what I hoped with it. Here's the problem:

Applications in the Microsoft Office 2008 suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage) all require that a shared database be open whenever one or more of the applications in that suite is/are running. So quitting one application in that suite leaves the database open if another application in the suite is still running (a frequent occurrence).

The problem, at least as I understand it, is that the database in question cannot be captured accurately while it's open?and I need its capture to be accurate. Since I often run two or more of those four Office applications at the same time, setting QRecall to capture that database when I quit any one of those four means the database gets captured while it's open because another member of the MS Office suite is still using it.

If I set the QRecall event schedule to capture that database when I quit one of those MS applications, the capture event occurs just as it should (regardless of the open/closed condition of the database). But as noted above that doesn't meet my need. If I'm to use this new feature of QRecall 2.0, it seems that what I need as this event-trigger is something that quits only when ALL the Microsoft applications in that Office suite have finally quit. Of course, there's no way to predict which one will be the last to close; hence my interest in finding some way to have QRecall capture that database only when the last of member of that suite has finally quit, no matter which of them that may be from time to time.

There is an application called Microsoft Database Daemon that as far as I can tell runs only when one or more of the applications in that suite is open and running. So in planning my upgrade to QRecall 2.0, I had hoped that I could define the automatic quit of the Microsoft Database Daemon as the trigger-event for capturing that database. But I can't get that to work?perhaps because its Quit action is software controlled and doesn't quit the way a traditional application would.

Is there a way to get that to work? Or is there another/better way to get QRecall 2.0 to capture that database automatically only when the last of those four (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Entourage) has finally quit (and therefore they are ALL finally no longer running)?

I have a work-around for this that I've been using for years, so it is not a critical issue; but if there's a cleaner solution to this, I'd prefer to drop my work-around and just have QRecall 2.0 capture that database automatically whenever I quit whichever of those four happens to be the last one quit.

Thanks for listening?and for the best and most flexible back-up software for my purposes I've ever encountered over the last 20 years.

Kenneth,

Yikes, that's a tough one.

You've obviously tried to create a capture action that runs when the Microsoft Database Daemon quits, and since that doesn't work it makes me think that the daemon app either isn't a standard Cocoa application or Microsoft is launching it using their own mechanism (which is not unlikely, Microsoft tends to do things "their way"). Regardless, the Microsoft Database Daemon seems to be flying under the workspace radar.

Unfortunately, this probably means my next suggestion won't work either. That suggestion is to create a set of actions that run when each application quits, and to each one add a one minute delay and a condition that skips the action if the Microsoft Database Daemon is still running. But if the workspace doesn't see the daemon app launch and quit, then it probably can't tell if it's running either.

Going a little deeper, it might be possible to script something that can test (via ps or some other tool) if the database daemon is running and then script the capture to start using the new qrecall tool, but I don't have any good suggestions on what might run that script in a timely fashion.

I have some enhancements on the horizon (probably in 2.1) that would solve this, but those are still on the drawing board...

James,

I suspected that trivial wasn't a good word to describe what I'm looking for. I'll experiment with your suggestion, but I also don't hold out much hope given the way I suspect Microsoft has built this. I'll let you know either way.

Meanwhile I'll look forward to 2.1 as the next possibility (I understand no guarantees it will enable what I'm looking for either), and for now I'll just be happy to keep doing what I've been doing to capture that database. Thanks for considering the question and letting me know your thoughts.

The future feature I'm thinking of is the ability to execute a script, either before or after, an action runs. The script that runs before will have the ability to cancel the action.

It would then be possible to write a script that determines if the the database daemon is running and cancel the capture. You would then create a capture action for each MS Office application, and the script would prevent all but the last application to quit from running the action.

You could almost do that now with schedule conditions, but currently you can only attach one "ignore if application X is running" condition. I'd like to expand that too, so you can attach multiple application conditions. Using that technique, you could create an action the captures when you quit Word, but then ignore the action if any of the other MS Office apps were running. Again, the idea to let only the last application that quits trigger the capture.