With Spotlight it is easy to search for content on the whole computer. I just wanted to restrict it to my notes database.
NSMetadataQuery knows the method setSearchScopes: for this. I set the scope to the directory just before starting the query, as I set the search predicate. Unfortunately I always ended up with at most one result, even when I knew that there would be more.The solution to this was to directly call
setSearchScopes: after initializing the query: _query = [[NSMetadataQuery alloc] init];
// Restrict the search to our working directory
NSString *path = [@"~/Library/QNotes" stringByExpandingTildeInPath];
[_query setSearchScopes:[NSArray arrayWithObjects:path,nil]];Now I am correctly seeing all results.
Btw.: Ars technica as a nice article about spotlight, even if it ends up in Spotlight gui bashing at the end. But the first half is a good read.
Apple also has a good overview article.
What I want to do is create a NSPredicate, and pass it into some API with a file path to get a boolean result as to whether that file matches the predicate, but I can't seem to find any API that does that.
ReplyDeleteSure, I could use the NSMetadataQuery to pass in the directory of the file, and see if the file I care about is one of the ones returned by the query, but that seems like a very round about way to achieve it.
Another thing is, I can't see any API that actually returns the Spotlight attributes for a particular file.