Applescript to remove items from dock

Question

I'm trying to remove (all) items from the dock. I can remove them by name like so:

tell application "System Events"
    tell UI element "Launchpad" of list 1 of process "Dock"
        perform action "AXShowMenu"
        click menu item "Remove from Dock" of menu 1
    end tell
end tell

But I'd like to pull the list of current items and iterate over them. This stack overflow question seems to cover how to get the list. What I'd like to do is tweak the above code to operate inside of a loop. I would guess that referencing the current item of the list inside the loop would be done with "thisRecord". I think I'm misunderstanding how to convert "thisRecord" into something I can reference within system events.

set plistpath to (path to preferences folder as text) & "com.apple.dock.plist"

tell application "System Events"
    set plistContents to contents of property list file plistpath
    set pListItems to value of plistContents
end tell
set persistentAppsList to |persistent-apps| of pListItems

set dockAppsList to {}
repeat with thisRecord in persistentAppsList
    set end of dockAppsList to |file-label| of |tile-data| of thisRecord
    tell application "System Events"
        tell UI element application thisRecord
            perform action "AXShowMenu"
            click menu item "Remove from Dock" of menu 1
        end tell
    end tell
end repeat  

Answer 1

As an alternative... Here is a much more straight forwards approach to removing the persistent apps on the Dock found in the persistent-apps key of the com.apple.dock.plist file:

In Terminal, do the following to first backup the target file:

1. cd ~/Library/Preferences
2. cp -a com.apple.dock.plist com.apple.dock.plist.bak

Now to remove the persistent apps, use the following compound command:

defaults delete com.apple.dock persistent-apps; killall Dock

If later you want to restore the backup, use the following compound command:

 cd ~/Library/Preferences; rm com.apple.dock.plist; cp -a com.apple.dock.plist.bak com.apple.dock.plist; killall Dock

If for some reason you need to do this with AppleScript, you can use the do shell script command to run these shell commands.

---

Note: In your OP you stated "I'm trying to remove (all) items from the dock." and the code you've presented only focuses on the apps stored under the persistent-apps key. There are also additional items that can show on the Dock, the first being the default persistent-others, which has the Downloads stack and other items you've added to that section. Then with macOS Mojave there is recent-apps which shows between the two aforementioned sections (by key name) on the Dock. The same premise can be use on these keys as well, substituting persistent-others or recent-apps for persistent-apps in the defaults delete ... compound command.