Opening in Parallels Applications

I have some files on the Mac side, in EF libraries, that depend on Windows applications within Parallels. However, if I double-click on a record, nothing happens–even if Parallels is open and even if the application is open (or closed).

I can use Get Info on the Mac side to specify an opening application, but I don’t know how to browse to the application in Parallels. I can use Reecords/Open with within EF to specify the application, but I don’t see a way to specify the Windows application.

I can drag the file from the record viewer to the Mac desktop and then open the item from within the applcation in Parallels (in this case Analytica is the application), but that’s a bit clumsy and “out of paradigm.”

Probably an unrelated point: in the bottom right window, some of these files show up in text, probably because EF doesn’t recognize them as known application files, but observes that they are indeed text files.

I thought some Parallels user might have figured all this out.

Solution
When telling a file what to use as an opener in Windows, one must go to a different place than Applications. The solution, then, was:

  1. Use Get-Info to navigate to the folder containing Parallel’s virtual hard disk for Windows, which also contains a folder called Windows Applications. In that folder I could specify the new version of the application. And then I could use Get Info’s option to change all the related files’ tags.

  2. After that, if I double-clicked on a file in EF, Parallels would struggle to open but there were demands for log-in information and so on. In fact, Parallels crashed for some reason. I then opened Parallels before double-clicking on the file in EF. Now everything worked.

A given record of this type still displays as plain text in the EF record viewer, but that is probably “correct”. The same thing happens with OmniGraffle records.

Thanks for the tip. EagleFiler uses the same file-opener preferences as the Finder, so I’m kind of surprised that Parallels didn’t already set the openers in order to make double-clicking from the Finder work.

It wasn’t EF’s fault. As it happens, I had upgraded the version of Analytica in Windows some weeks ago, but the files were from the previous version. The files were “marked” to open in Parallels, but were looking for something that no longer existed–the old version.