Re: Spotlight importer for records

FROM : Adam P Jenkins
DATE : Mon Mar 03 14:50:08 2008

Thank you for the information.  Search Kit does allow indexing 
arbitrary pieces of data that don't have to correspond to actual 
files, and since Spotlight is built on top of Search Kit I thought 
there would be some way to do the same thing.

Thanks,
Adam

On Mar 3, 2008, at 1:54 AM, Jens Alfke wrote:

>
> On 2 Mar '08, at 10:09 PM, Adam P Jenkins wrote:
>

>> I'd like to make Spotlight index individual records from my 
>> application, rather than whole files.

>
> Spotlight doesn't support that yet. Its unit of granularity is whole 
> files.
>

>> Some examples of this are Apple's own iCal, Address Book, and 
>> Mail.app.  For instance if you type in someone's name in the 
>> Spotlight search box, in addition to files which contain that name, 
>> individual Address Book entries that match will show up, and 
>> selecting one of them will start Address Book with that address 
>> showing.

>
> Mail and AB do that by creating individual files for every record, 
> for Spotlight to index. The ones for Address Book are stored in ~/
> Library/Application Support/Address Book/Metadata/.
>
> You can do the same thing yourself. It doesn't even matter what kind 
> of data is in the files, as long as your importer knows how to read 
> them. (For example, the AB files aren't vCards, just property lists 
> containing the metadata.) Of course you have to keep these files and 
> their contents in sync with your real database, which can be a pain.
>
> —Jens