Record Level Spotlight indexing with Coredata

Question

I've read the tutorial at https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/cocoa/Conceptual/SpotlightCoreData/Articles/recordLevel.html so many times now, I can't seem to get it for some reason.

I've tried creating the spotlight importer, manually copying it to ~/Library/Spotlight with no success.

Can anyone be point me to a working sample of CoreData-Spotlight-OSX app? a remotely basic thing would suffice.

The xcode template default-stores .importer in the bundle-resources folder, I've read in other places that it should be in a Library/Spotlight folder if the app is sandboxed.

again, tried & failed.

help!

Answer 1

I’ve written a CoreData / Spotlight importer. It’s always a bit of a struggle, even in the best of times. I wrote mine before those docs, and before they’d written the daemon that writes out the records for you. When the CoreData team first did their version of my solution theirs had several critical bugs which prevented me from using it, so I reported them and switched back to mine—I hope by now they are fixed, but this is something to be aware of.

The other thing to know is that a lot of app-makers (including me) have found Spotlight importing of CoreData records is broken on Mavericks, apparently because of changes in the sandbox. This has been widely reported and I’ve filed a bug. If you’re on Mavericks you might be hitting this problem as well.

But, to debuggin:

The first thing you should do is add some NSLogging to your importer, and check your Console after you make a change to your database. Wait to see if any process that starts with “md” (metadata) reports errors, or if you see the logs your wrote.

Also, do a man mdimport and the run mdimport from the command-line on your plug-in with one of the record files. With mdimport’s -g option you can test your importer wherever it is, and with -d4 you’ll get a lot of debugging info.

You can also do a mdimport -L to see if your importer is being seen by the system.

In general, you need to find out ⑴ does your importer work or does it just crash (by running it directly with mdimporter) ⑵ does the system see your importer and recognize that it’s in charge of stubs with your chosen filetype (mdimport -L) and ⑶ does your importer have permission to see the record files (by running your app and watching the Console).