Using Spotlight in Cocoa

4
votes

Can I use the Spotlight APIs (they exist, right?) in Cocoa to determine if Spotlight (in the upper-right corner) would match a given filePath with a given string?

In other words, given a filePath such as "/Users/enchilada/Desktop/MapOfUSA.pdf", and a string such as "Virginia", how would I tell if Spotlight would show this file when "Virginia" would have been typed in the upper-right Spotlight search? (As you can imagine, in the example shown, it would probably be matched, because a PDF map of the USA probably contains Virgina.)

If possible, a simple code piece to do this would be appreciated.

1
objective-ccocoaspotlight
The first sentence of your question can be answered with a quick Google search ("cocoa spotlight api"). The results of that search will lead you to the rest. – Joshua Nozzi
Actually, leaving out 'api' gives much better results when looking for Cocoa Spotlight documentation? Furthermore, the @Enchilada seems to labor under the idea that said 'api' will give access to the Finder GUI -- it would have been nice to clear up that misunderstanding instead of downvoting an obvious newbie question. I'm reversing the downvote. – Elise van Looij

1 Answers

6
votes

You can use the NSMetadataQuery class or its underlying CFType MDQuery. O'Reilly has published an example.