creating an applescript record with user defined labels in Xojo

Perhaps this really is documented somewhere, but I couldn't find it. Or perhaps it's so obvious that everyone else has been doing it for a decade but I just figured it out.

In Xojo (IDE previously known as REALbasic) you can create enumerated records with 4 byte codes that are translated into labels by the applescript dictionary.

dim MyRecord as new AppleEventRecord

MyRecord.StringParam( "xxxx") = "my data here"
and if you have an enumeration for the xxxx in your dictionary that says it means "cool stuff" then you can access that record in applescript by saying

set myThing to cool stuff of ThatRecord

and you'll get that data out again. But in order for that to be useful you have to know what those labels are ahead of time. In a script itself you can create a record with labels defined at runtime like:

set myRecord to {label1:"value1", label2:"value2", etc...}

and then you can access them via those label names

set myString to label1 of myRecord

but until yesterday I've never been able to create a record that had user defined labels in Xojo code. It's a simple matter of creating a AppleEventDescList with alternating label/value pairs in it and then placing it inside an AppleEventRecord with the 4 byte code of "usrf"

dim theRecord as new AppleEventRecord
dim theList as new AppleEventDescList

theList.appendString( "label1")
theList.appendString( "value1")
theList.appendString( "label2")
theList.appendString( "value2")
etc...

theRecord.DescListParam( "usrf") = theList

now if you return that record from an event the calling script will be able to treat it like a user defined list and use it the same way like:

set myString to label1 of TheRecord

Specifically i'm using this in a JSON parser where you just wont know the labels before hand so there is no chance to pre-build them as enumerations into the scripting dictionary.