Applications not written for the Workplace Shell need to be aware of how .LONGNAME and .ASSOCTABLE extended attributes are used by the Workplace Shell.

In the Workplace Shell, the user can edit the name of an object. When an object is a file system object, the Workplace Shell renames the file object to match the name the user has entered. When the file system object resides on an HPFS disk, the new file name can have a long name and can accommodate whatever the user has entered. When the file system object resides on a FAT disk, the new file name must be no longer than eight characters. If the user has entered a name longer than eight characters, the Workplace Shell uses the first eight characters to rename the object and places the entire title in the .LONGNAME extended attribute associated with the file system object. This means that the title of a file object is the .LONGNAME extended attribute or the file name, if no .LONGNAME exists.

An .ASSOCTABLE extended attribute contains information that associates data files with the applications that create them or that know how to use them. Applications that a data file has been associated with appear in the list of Open actions for the data file. This means that opening the file is equivalent to starting the application that creates or modifies that file. The application is passed the name of the file as a command-line parameter.

.ASSOCTABLE extended attributes are defined in an application's resource file, as shown in the following example:

ASSOCTABLE assoctable-id [load-option] [mem-option]
BEGIN
  association-name, file-match-string [,extended-attribute-flag] [,icon-filename]
END

When an application that defines an .ASSOCTABLE is installed in the Workplace Shell, the Workplace Shell automatically creates object templates for each type of data file that has been associated with the application.