Re: New Spotlight Info
Re: New Spotlight Info
- Subject: Re: New Spotlight Info
- From: Wade Tregaskis <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 9 Nov 2004 20:30:57 +1100
There is no new special "metadata" fork or whatever. Spotlight works
by having importer plug-ins extract metadata from normal files, in
exactly the same way iTunes extracts the album, artist, etc. from the
ID3 tags, or iPhoto examines EXIF tags. Spotlight is 'simply' a way of
centralizing all this data.
To re-iterate, the metadata of an MP3 _is_ the contents of the ID3
tags, which is in the data fork. The metadata of a JPEG is the EXIF
portion, which is in the data fork. The metadata of your document type
is in the document binary file, or the document package, or stored
with the other data in your XML document, or whatever. A Spotlight
importer of the appropriate type (e.g. JPEG, MP3, etc.) is passed a
file and asked to return the metadata in a standard way. For your
document type, _you_ must write an importer that takes your document
and gives back to Spotlight a CFDictionary (IIRC) of metadata
attributes.
Yes, I know how it works, I was more getting at how it links back to
the original source from that meta-data; i.e. does it store the
absolute path, use Carbon aliases, etc. And in any case, what other
procedures does it follow in the event that the original data goes
walkies - does it even notice when this happens? i.e. can you get
bogus results for files that no longer exist?
Wade Tregaskis (AIM, Yahoo & Skype: wadetregaskis, ICQ: 40056898, MSN &
email: email@hidden, Jabber:
email@hidden)
-- Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
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