Re: Spotlight w/ HFS Extended Attributes

FROM : Scott Anguish
DATE : Wed May 04 08:15:08 2005

On May 4, 2005, at 12:07 AM, Lee Morgan wrote:

> 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.
>

    file a bug (and send me the number) or mail DTS and express your 
interest in a Spotlight mailing list.  Please..


> 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.


    No, this isn't currently possible to my knowledge.


> 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).


    Solved your own problem.. excellent! :-)


--
"William Cheeseman ... is said not to be a doofus in real life." - 
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times Online

Scott Anguish
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