In NSFileProviderItemProtocol I am able to use the extendedAttributes property call to add my custom extended attributes to my NSFileProviderReplicatedExtension extension files. Given that the Finder uses com.apple.metadata:kMDItemFinderComment extended attribute for file comments I thought it would be possible to populate my files with useful comments provided by the third part API. Unfortunately I seems to be unable to do so as if com.apple.metadata.... fields were inaccessible from the FP extension. Is there any way to achieve this ?

In the context of a NSFileProviderReplicatedExtension I would like to only see the "Move to Bin" Finder action when files have been materlialised ( isDownloaded fileprovider attribute ) I thought it might be possible to get the isDownloaded attribute in my NSFileProviderItemProtocol class capabilities method but that doesn't seem to be the case. Possible ?

I need to disallow folder renaming on my NSFileProviderReplicatedExtension extension as my foreign API system changes the asset id when a folder gets renamed and I can't retrieve or compute the new ID. For this reason I disable .allowsRenaming on folders for this volume but the Finder will still trigger the two step create "untitled folder" / rename when creating new folders. I can see that existing folders can't be renamed on the volume so the capability seems properly managed by my extension. Is there a way to prevent the creation of the "untitled folder" folder when creating new folders in Finder on a folder with renaming disabled ?

Is it possible to notify my fileprovider extension to pre-load folders recursively from a given starting point ? I am currently doing this externally from user space with a thread that crawls through the folder tree but wondering if there is a better way.