Not everything in the user interface is recordable in Actions. (Far from it, in fact.) So you have to try to devise workarounds.

For example, depending on the specifics of your situation, you may be able to work around the missing Swatch problem by having something already residing on the clipboard that is filled or stroked with that Swatch, and that is "tagged" with a piece of text in the Note field of the Attributes palette:

1. In a new document, create a Global Swatch, and give it a unique name (Ex: MyGlobalSwatch).

2. Draw a simple path (an ellipse or anything). Stroke of none, Fill of MyGlobalSwatch.

3. Select the path. In the Note field of the Attributes palette, type "TempObject".

4. Copy the object to the clipboard.

5. In your Action, after the step that opens the source file, include a Paste step. That will create the Swatch.

6. At the end of your Action, include a Select Object... step that selects an object by the Note "TempObject", followed by a Delete step.

As for locking objects that are contained in the source file, the objects of interest would have to have some attribute that is selectable by an Action and which distinguishes that/those object(s) from others. So...

1. Find something (a stroke weight, a stroke color, a fill color) that is unique to the objects in the source files that you want to lock, and that is consistent in all the incoming source files.

2. Use a temporary object on the clipboard as described above, to which you have applied that same attribute, and which you have tagged with a Note.

3. In the Action, similarly include steps to Paste the temporary object. Follow that with a step to invoke the appropriate Select Same... command. Then lock the selection.

Again, the possibilities depend on specifics of the objects involved. When you just can't devise an Action-based workaround, that's when you resort to scripting. After resorting to scripting is when you find out that the scripting model cannot access everything in the user interface, either. That's when you realize that alot of wonderful things could be done by combining Actions and Scripts for a given task. That's when you find out that Scripts can't call Actions, and although Actions can invoke Scripts, they don't do it reliably; the Action steps which invoke the scripts do not survive re-launches of the program. This bug has gone uncorrected for something like five or six full versions now.

JET