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I involved with the development of an application that is intended to deploy on multiple desktop system including the Macintosh.

Our team decided we would like to a drag and drop installation for the Macintosh. However, the application is intended to ship with other content besides the application itself such as example files.

Originally these files were placed in the application bundle, however this was discovered to be problematic as the cross platform libraries used for the user interface will not allow someone to access the contents in the bundle. Also force users to have to dive into a bundle to find content does not offer a great user experience.

To that end, we decided to pull these examples file and what not out of the bundle and place them in a separated folder that lived along side the application bundle. To make sure everything including the examples and the application were copied together during the drag and drop installation, a new top level folder was created that contained everything to be copied.

The problem that now exists is that whereby when originally just the application bundle was copied over to the system, the copying of this top level folder does not cause file associations for the application to occur automatically.

What can be done to associate an application with certain files when someone installs by dragging a folder contain the application bundle?

Tron Thomas
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  • You might find an answer here [Stackoverflow Link](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/435175/how-to-associate-file-type-with-macos-x-app-without-launching-it-first?rq=1) which also has a link to Apple Documentation here which probably has the specific information you need [Apple Documentation](http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Carbon/Conceptual/LaunchServicesConcepts/LSCConcepts/LSCConcepts.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP30000999-CH202-TP9) – Eric May 31 '13 at 23:25
  • I looked at the link and the documentation. It wasn't that helpful because before things were separated out and everything was in the application bundle, file association worked fine so everything was already set up properly. It is only after reorganizing things so that a folder gets dragged instead of the application itself that the association got broken. – Tron Thomas Jun 03 '13 at 17:49

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I suggest you to deliver it separately in one dmg. So your dmg structure will look like next:
MyApp -> Applications
MyApp Examples -> Application Support

Simple, user-friendly, no problems with association.

cody
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Actually it looks like the file association is working after all. Someone reported a defect against the installation not making the associations. However, I just tested the installation on a clean system and copying over the folder does seem to make the associations.

Tron Thomas
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