How to create association in application now?

["paul.wu" <Paul Wu Sun COM>]

Many application need add associations to a certain file after it is
installed. Before Gnome2.8, I can approach it by creating 2 files,
*.keys and *.mime, in ~/.local/share/mime-info/.
Now it is an unhappy trip to create an association in GNOME,
first: I need add a mime-type in mime database by 3 steps,
http://www.freebsd.org/gnome/docs/faq2.html#q22 ,especially it need
re-login Gnome to make the changes take effect.
second: I create an association to this mime-type.It seems need to
modify several
files,~/.local/share/applications/defaults.list,~/.local/share/applications/[application_name].desktop,~/.local/share/applications/mimeinfo.cache.
Are there any other methods to do it?
Does GNOME will support it in future? (I found some Api supported
application-registry have been
deprecated.http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gnome-vfs-2.0/gnome-vfs-20-gnome-vfs-application-registry.html ) 

Thanks.