How do I associate file types with an iPhone application?

File type handling is new with iPhone OS 3.2, and is different than the already-existing custom URL schemes. You can register your application to handle particular document types, and any application that uses a document controller can hand off processing of these documents to your own application.

For example, my application Molecules (for which the source code is available) handles the .pdb and .pdb.gz file types, if received via email or in another supported application.

To register support, you will need to have something like the following in your Info.plist:

<key>CFBundleDocumentTypes</key>
<array>
    <dict>
        <key>CFBundleTypeIconFiles</key>
        <array>
            <string>Document-molecules-320.png</string>
            <string>Document-molecules-64.png</string>
        </array>
        <key>CFBundleTypeName</key>
        <string>Molecules Structure File</string>
        <key>CFBundleTypeRole</key>
        <string>Viewer</string>
        <key>LSHandlerRank</key>
        <string>Owner</string>
        <key>LSItemContentTypes</key>
        <array>
            <string>com.sunsetlakesoftware.molecules.pdb</string>
            <string>org.gnu.gnu-zip-archive</string>
        </array>
    </dict>
</array>

Two images are provided that will be used as icons for the supported types in Mail and other applications capable of showing documents. The LSItemContentTypes key lets you provide an array of Uniform Type Identifiers (UTIs) that your application can open. For a list of system-defined UTIs, see Apple's Uniform Type Identifiers Reference. Even more detail on UTIs can be found in Apple's Uniform Type Identifiers Overview. Those guides reside in the Mac developer center, because this capability has been ported across from the Mac.

One of the UTIs used in the above example was system-defined, but the other was an application-specific UTI. The application-specific UTI will need to be exported so that other applications on the system can be made aware of it. To do this, you would add a section to your Info.plist like the following:

<key>UTExportedTypeDeclarations</key>
<array>
    <dict>
        <key>UTTypeConformsTo</key>
        <array>
            <string>public.plain-text</string>
            <string>public.text</string>
        </array>
        <key>UTTypeDescription</key>
        <string>Molecules Structure File</string>
        <key>UTTypeIdentifier</key>
        <string>com.sunsetlakesoftware.molecules.pdb</string>
        <key>UTTypeTagSpecification</key>
        <dict>
            <key>public.filename-extension</key>
            <string>pdb</string>
            <key>public.mime-type</key>
            <string>chemical/x-pdb</string>
        </dict>
    </dict>
</array>

This particular example exports the com.sunsetlakesoftware.molecules.pdb UTI with the .pdb file extension, corresponding to the MIME type chemical/x-pdb.

With this in place, your application will be able to handle documents attached to emails or from other applications on the system. In Mail, you can tap-and-hold to bring up a list of applications that can open a particular attachment.

When the attachment is opened, your application will be started and you will need to handle the processing of this file in your -application:didFinishLaunchingWithOptions: application delegate method. It appears that files loaded in this manner from Mail are copied into your application's Documents directory under a subdirectory corresponding to what email box they arrived in. You can get the URL for this file within the application delegate method using code like the following:

NSURL *url = (NSURL *)[launchOptions valueForKey:UIApplicationLaunchOptionsURLKey];

Note that this is the same approach we used for handling custom URL schemes. You can separate the file URLs from others by using code like the following:

if ([url isFileURL])
{
    // Handle file being passed in
}
else
{
    // Handle custom URL scheme
}

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In addition to Brad's excellent answer, I have found out that (on iOS 4.2.1 at least) when opening custom files from the Mail app, your app is not fired or notified if the attachment has been opened before. The "open with…" popup appears, but just does nothing.

This seems to be fixed by (re)moving the file from the Inbox directory. A safe approach seems to be to both (re)move the file as it is opened (in -(BOOL)application:openURL:sourceApplication:annotation:) as well as going through the Documents/Inbox directory, removing all items, e.g. in applicationDidBecomeActive:. That last catch-all may be needed to get the app in a clean state again, in case a previous import causes a crash or is interrupted.

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BIG WARNING: Make ONE HUNDRED PERCENT sure that your extension is not already tied to some mime type.

We used the extension '.icz' for our custom files for, basically, ever, and Safari just never would let you open them saying "Safari cannot open this file." no matter what we did or tried with the UT stuff above.

Eventually I realized that there are some UT* C functions you can use to explore various things, and while .icz gives the right answer (our app):

In app did load at top, just do this...

NSString * UTI = (NSString *)UTTypeCreatePreferredIdentifierForTag(kUTTagClassFilenameExtension, 
                                                                   (CFStringRef)@"icz", 
                                                                   NULL);
CFURLRef ur =UTTypeCopyDeclaringBundleURL(UTI);

and put break after that line and see what UTI and ur are -- in our case, it was our identifier as we wanted), and the bundle url (ur) was pointing to our app's folder.

But the MIME type that Dropbox gives us back for our link, which you can check by doing e.g.

$ curl -D headers THEURLGOESHERE > /dev/null
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100 27393  100 27393    0     0  24983      0  0:00:01  0:00:01 --:--:-- 28926
$ cat headers
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
accept-ranges: bytes
cache-control: max-age=0
content-disposition: attachment; filename="123.icz"
Content-Type: text/calendar
Date: Fri, 24 May 2013 17:41:28 GMT
etag: 872926d
pragma: public
Server: nginx
x-dropbox-request-id: 13bd327248d90fde
X-RequestId: bf9adc56934eff0bfb68a01d526eba1f
x-server-response-time: 379
Content-Length: 27393
Connection: keep-alive

The Content-Type is what we want. Dropbox claims this is a text/calendar entry. Great. But in my case, I've ALREADY TRIED PUTTING text/calendar into my app's mime types, and it still doesn't work. Instead, when I try to get the UTI and bundle url for the text/calendar mimetype,

NSString * UTI = (NSString *)UTTypeCreatePreferredIdentifierForTag(kUTTagClassMIMEType,
                                                                   (CFStringRef)@"text/calendar", 
                                                                   NULL);

CFURLRef ur =UTTypeCopyDeclaringBundleURL(UTI);

I see "com.apple.ical.ics" as the UTI and ".../MobileCoreTypes.bundle/" as the bundle URL. Not our app, but Apple. So I try putting com.apple.ical.ics into the LSItemContentTypes alongside my own, and into UTConformsTo in the export, but no go.

So basically, if Apple thinks they want to at some point handle some form of file type (that could be created 10 years after your app is live, mind you), you will have to change extension cause they'll simply not let you handle the file type.

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To deal with any type of files for my own APP, I use this configuration for CFBundleDocumentTypes:

    <key>CFBundleDocumentTypes</key>
    <array>
        <dict>
            <key>CFBundleTypeName</key>
            <string>IPA</string>
            <key>LSItemContentTypes</key>
            <array>
                <string>public.item</string>
                <string>public.content</string>
                <string>public.data</string>
                <string>public.database</string>
                <string>public.composite-content</string>
                <string>public.contact</string>
                <string>public.archive</string>
                <string>public.url-name</string>
                <string>public.text</string>
                <string>public.plain-text</string>
                <string>public.source-code</string>
                <string>public.executable</string>
                <string>public.script</string>
                <string>public.shell-script</string>
                <string>public.xml</string>
                <string>public.symlink</string>
                <string>org.gnu.gnu-zip-archve</string>
                <string>org.gnu.gnu-tar-archive</string>
                <string>public.image</string>
                <string>public.movie</string>
                <string>public.audiovisual-​content</string>
                <string>public.audio</string>
                <string>public.directory</string>
                <string>public.folder</string>
                <string>com.apple.bundle</string>
                <string>com.apple.package</string>
                <string>com.apple.plugin</string>
                <string>com.apple.application-​bundle</string>
                <string>com.pkware.zip-archive</string>
                <string>public.filename-extension</string>
                <string>public.mime-type</string>
                <string>com.apple.ostype</string>
                <string>com.apple.nspboard-typ</string>
                <string>com.adobe.pdf</string>
                <string>com.adobe.postscript</string>
                <string>com.adobe.encapsulated-​postscript</string>
                <string>com.adobe.photoshop-​image</string>
                <string>com.adobe.illustrator.ai-​image</string>
                <string>com.compuserve.gif</string>
                <string>com.microsoft.word.doc</string>
                <string>com.microsoft.excel.xls</string>
                <string>com.microsoft.powerpoint.​ppt</string>
                <string>com.microsoft.waveform-​audio</string>
                <string>com.microsoft.advanced-​systems-format</string>
                <string>com.microsoft.advanced-​stream-redirector</string>
                <string>com.microsoft.windows-​media-wmv</string>
                <string>com.microsoft.windows-​media-wmp</string>
                <string>com.microsoft.windows-​media-wma</string>
                <string>com.apple.keynote.key</string>
                <string>com.apple.keynote.kth</string>
                <string>com.truevision.tga-image</string>
            </array>
            <key>CFBundleTypeIconFiles</key>
            <array>
                <string>Icon-76@2x</string>
            </array>
        </dict>
    </array>

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