Ah. The joys and vagarities of Applescript implementations in vendor applications. There’s been a problem in the iView Applescript implementation for a while and, as someone has just run into it again, it’s probably worth writing it up.

If you view a subset of an iView catalog (for example, you click on a specific location in the “Organize” pane), you’ll spot that the title of the catalog changes from

to

So far, so good. Unfortunately, this seems to hobble iView’s ability to find the catalog from Applescript with the name “DNG”. In fact, it doesn’t even seem to work if you try the full name. And, to add insult to injury, if you ask for a list of all the open catalogs when they’re being displayed as subsets, you get the base name back.

So, what does this mean? Well, it means tools like MetaSync don’t work if a catalog you want to work with (either as a source or destination) is showing a subset. You’ll get the error shown in the title of the post if you try it. The fix is to always do a “show all” before attempting a sync between catalogs.

I’ve reported this to iView - hopefully it’ll be fixed in a release fairly soon.