Associating certain file extension to my android application

Question

I'm having trouble associating my custom file extension to my android application that I am developing. In my android manifest file I have the following:

<data android:scheme="file" android:mimeType="*/*" android:pathPattern="*.*\\.myFileExt" />
<data android:scheme="content" android:mimeType="*/*" android:pathPattern="*.*\\.myFileExt" />  

It kinda works. Let me explain. I have a file in my gmail( sent a file to my self ), which has the proper extension, so when I download it from my phone's browser and click open, it opens my application correctly, but if I explore to that file path; where the file is located, and try to open it, my phone says no application can open this file-type.

Any ideas on how to solve this problem?

Answer 1

Some cases are kinda tricky, I've settled on using:

    <intent-filter>
        <action android:name="android.intent.action.VIEW" />
        <category android:name="android.intent.category.DEFAULT" />
        <category android:name="android.intent.category.BROWSABLE" />
        <data android:scheme="file" />                               
        <data android:mimeType="*/*" />
        <data android:pathPattern=".*\\.myFileExt" />
        <data android:host="*" />
    </intent-filter>

and this sometimes fails because sometimes only a more global mime type (in my case XML) is used:

    <intent-filter>
        <action android:name="android.intent.action.VIEW" />
        <category android:name="android.intent.category.DEFAULT" />
        <category android:name="android.intent.category.BROWSABLE" />
        <data android:mimeType="text/xml" />
    </intent-filter>

Answer 2

Your filter-snippet is too short to check it for errors. You should have included the whole <intent-filter>.

One mistake is in your pathPattern: it can’t start with an asterisk, e.g. *.* is wrong. That crappy Android glob matching here handles . and .* and x* only (the last one matches “”, “x” ... and “xxxxxx”, ...)

Furthermore, the “host” attribute is missing. pathPattern is meaningless if scheme or host are missing.

Answer 3

After spending a few hours on this issue I finally came up with this solution (AAA is the file extension):

<intent-filter>
    <action android:name="android.intent.action.VIEW" />
    <category android:name="android.intent.category.DEFAULT" />
    <data android:mimeType="*/*" />
    <data android:scheme="file" />
    <data android:host="*" />
    <data android:port="*" />
    <data android:pathPattern=".*..*..*..*..*.AAA" />
    <data android:pathPattern=".*..*..*..*.AAA" />
    <data android:pathPattern=".*..*..*.AAA" />
    <data android:pathPattern=".*..*.AAA" />
    <data android:pathPattern=".*.AAA" />
</intent-filter>

The reason for all of those pathPattern is that if you have a dot in your file name the general form of .*.AAA will not match the filename.