associate file types

Doing that would be considered very, very rude. If you put the right things into your plist then the OS will know that you can open .xyz file and start your application if nobody else does, but it won't change the default unless the user says so.

In Carbon, you'll receive an AppleEvent telling you that a document was opened. There is probably sample code available at developer.apple.com. Cocoa will open the document automatically.

 

Sadly, it's a common practice.

 

http://developer.apple.com/document...ocTypePList.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20000024

That is a document (Cocoa oriented, but it works for Carbon too) on how you can use XCode to edit the file associations in a table rather than hand-editing your Info.plist file.

So select your target, get info, and go to the properties tab.

 

In Cocoa, the class and NIB for the document type is automatically loaded and opened for you. You should associate the file type with the right NSDocument subclass you want to use. Your class will get created, and then told to load the data from an NSData object.

http://developer.apple.com/document...c/instm/NSDocument/readFromData:ofType:error:

 

Look at the NSDocument reference, there are variations that work on pre-10.4 systems. Dig in a bit and your answer is right there in the same class reference document I linked in my last post.

And Cocoa will not parse the file for you, but rather in the method I suggested, it passes you the raw contents of the file in an NSData object, other variations give you the NSURL to the file itself and let you load it from the filepath.

 

Just a note about the problem of getting only the file path when a file is double clicked. This is particularly relevant if you have an application that is not NSDocument based, but can still open files.

Once you have the file associations set up as mentioned in this thread (by setting your pList corrently) then double clicking a file will call

- (BOOL)application: (NSApplication * )theApplication openFile: (NSString * )filename;

of your application delegate.

However, if double clicking that file causes your app to launch, then this function is actually called before your
- (void)applicationDidFinishLaunching: (NSNotification * )aNotification
method. So, if you have significant initialization in the applicationDidFinishLaunching you should save the filename variable into a member variable of your delegate, and process it once the initialization is complete.

- (BOOL)application: (NSApplication * )theApplication openFile: (NSString * )filename
{
// if the file opening launches us, we have not initialized pApp_G, or our controllers, etc
// so we we need to store the launch path and then load the file later.
if(!pApp_G)
{
// store it in an array (or just set an NSString)
m_openedFilesArray = [NSMutableArray arrayWithCapacity: 1];
[m_openedFilesArray addObject: filename];
}
else
{
//handle the file opening directly here
}

return TRUE;
}

Hope this helps some of you that have also had this issue.