Associating a File type with application

[wilsonowilson]

When you right-click a .pdf file and hover over the "Open with" menu on macOS or Windows, a list of applications that can open the file show up. How can we set file associations in a Nativeshell application?

[knopp]

Generally file associations are registered in Info.plist file. There's quite a bit of documentation about this online. However handling the file open notification will require some rust code right now.

I haven't tested this particular thing so it's possible that some things won't work. In general you will get a method called (application:openFiles:) or (application:openURLs:) on your NSApplicationDelegate. NativeShell exposes NSApplicationDelegate to rust, so you don't need to write any objc bindings.

Create a struct and let it implement the ApplicationDelegate trait. In the trait, override application_open_urls method. Then register your delegate

context.get().unwrap().application_delegate_manager.borrow().set_delegate(my_app_delegate);

At this point your should get notification when your application was asked to open URLs. After that you might need to use platform channels to let the dart code know that it should open the file.

[knopp]

I'll try to find some time to make a working example of this.

[wilsonowilson]

Thanks for the tips! But how do we edit the Info.plist file?

[knopp]

You can copy the Info.plist template from NativeShell, put it somewhere in your project and then reference it in build.rs:

let options = AppBundleOptions {
...
   info_plist_template: Some("resources/Info.plist".into()), // assuming you placed it in resources/Info.plist
...
}

[prateekmedia]

@knopp Can this be made multi-platform like for windows and linux too.