File extension associations are used to determine what application will be assigned to newly created documents. When an application is created in ProjectWise Administrator, the administrator has the option of associating to it some, all, or none of the file extensions typically associated with that application. When you create documents in ProjectWise, documents are automatically associated to applications based on their file extensions.

In ProjectWise Explorer, you can select an existing application and associate other file extensions to it, in addition to those already defined. You can also modify or remove existing extension associations. The changes you make are effective immediately and will be applied to new documents, but not to existing documents. For changes that affect existing documents, you must manually modify the properties of those documents.

For example, the extension DWG is associated to the application 'AutoCAD' by default. If you associate DWG to the application 'MicroStation' instead, any new DWG files added to ProjectWise will automatically be associated with 'MicroStation', but this will not change the application association of any existing DWG documents in ProjectWise.