Spotlight w/ HFS Extended Attributes

FROM : Lee Morgan
DATE : Wed May 04 06:07:50 2005

Sorry this is more Spotlight related than Cocoa, but seeing that 
there's no Spotlight mailing list, and my app is Cocoa based - I 
guess this is the closest I get.

I realize that the new HFS Extended Attributes are not exposed to the 
higher level API's yet, and also that Spotlight doesn't extract their 
contents during indexing. However I'm working on a application that 
would greatly benefit from Spotlight indexing this information. Is it 
possible to write a Spotlight importer that handles every file with 
out it interfering with other plug-ins? So that I can extract the 
extended attributes and add it to the Spotlight store.
If not, any recommendation on an alternative solution? I need to 
store user specified meta data with any given file. I've considered 
using the extended attributes and just creating my own index of them, 
however this means during a search that I would have to perform two 
searches - one for Spotlight and then from those results form another 
for my own extended attributes (or vise-versa, which would probably 
be faster come to think of it).

thanks,
lee