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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-01T18:16:08+00:00

I have a legacy app (minimally ported from Mac System 7 to Carbon to

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I have a legacy app (minimally ported from Mac System 7 to Carbon to Cocoa) where users are reporting that the kMDItemKind metadata, as reported my mdls, of text files saved by the app seem to be set to “Microsoft Excel 97-2004 workbook”. The legacy file creator and type should have been set to ‘cBaS’ and ‘TEXT’ (as was registered with Apple in ye ole ancient days), and the legacy file extension is “.bas”.

What sets the kMDItemKind metadata of saved files under Mac OS X?

How do I make sure that the kMDItemKind is set correctly when saving these text files, so that my app will open them?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You can’t directly set the kMDItemKind of a file. It is derived from other metadata. The file type code 'TEXT' is quite generic. The creator code is ignored these days. The file extension is probably what the system is relying on.

    Unfortunately, in your case, you have multiple apps which handle .bas files. Which of those the system picks is somewhat arbitrary and subject to change. Launch Services is assigning the kind based on which would actually be used and how that app defines the document type or UTI that’s matching the file extension.

    Normally, you should leave the association of files with specific applications to the user. If they want to change it, they can do so with Always Open With accessible in the Finder’s File menu or context menu when the Option key is held down. Or they can use the Get Info menu.

    Your best bet would be to switch to using a more-likely-to-be-unique file extension

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