cocoa open multiple files with associated app

Question

Hello,

I have an array of filenames that i would like to pass to an external application for opening. I'd like to do one of the following:

a) Somehow instruct OSX to open all these files with an associated application, but it must invoke the target app's openFiles NSApplication delegate method b) Specify the application to open these files with (and also invoke openFiles)

Basically it doesn't matter which solution to realise, because these files will be associated with the target application anyway. How would i do one of these things?

Answer 1

Check out the NSWorkspace methods, such as openFile:withApplication:.

Answer 2

To open a whole bunch of files at once, send the shared NSWorkspace object an openURLs:withAppBundleIdentifier:options:additionalEventParamDescriptor:launchIdentifiers: message, or call the LSOpenURLsWithRole function or the LSOpenFromURLSpec function. Either way, you'll pass an array of URLs to items to open.

Each one of these will let you identify a specific application to use. NSWorkspace lets you specify it by bundle identifier, while the two Launch Services functions let you provide the URL or FSRef to a specific application bundle.

… it must invoke the target app's openFiles NSApplication delegate method

That isn't possible to require, because (a) the application may be document-based, in which case it probably does not have an NSApplication delegate and, even if it does, such a delegate would probably not respond to application:openFiles:, and (b) the application may not be Cocoa-based, in which case it would handle the Open Documents Apple Event directly. None of this is your application's business, so don't worry about it.