AppleScript Help: Select all children

[Gavin Kistner]

On Saturday, April 26, 2003, at 09:29 PM, Gavin Kistner wrote:
> I wanted to write a script to select all descendants of the currently 
> selected object(s)...but I am  stymied again and again.

To clarify why I wanted this, and make the case as to why it should be 
a future feature for OmniGraffle (and then I'll stop spamming the list 
and wait for responses):

I'm making a strict hierarchy graph of over 250 items. (The Java 
classes of AppKit and Foundation for MacOS X Cocoa programming. I find 
a nice cheat sheet very helpful when starting learning.)

The auto layout and speed (even on this 1GHz with no shadows) is too 
painfully slow to find a good layout through repeated tests, and 
attempting to view all 512 graphics (counting the lines) on the screen 
at once is impossible to work with.

I was hoping to attack the problem from the edges in, grabbing a 
next-to-leaf node, arranging it and its leaves, and then grouping them 
once they were right, and slowly moving on up the tree from there. But 
the various layout iterations have left many lines crossing, making it 
a pain to find all the children of a node.

And so, rather than spending the time to manually find them, I've now 
spent last night and most of today trying to learn AS/JS in OmniGraffle 
(along with building the AS class hierarchy) to save myself the effort.

Oops :)

How much nicer a simple menu choice of "Edit->Select Downwind" would 
have been :)