Spotlight metadata importers allow Mac OS X to extract metadata from custom document formats.
You should read this document if your application saves custom document types to disk. All applications that support saving documents to disk should consider providing Spotlight support by implementing a metadata importer.
The following articles cover key concepts in understanding how metadata importers work:
“Extracting Metadata from Documents” describes the role of the metadata importer and its components.
“Assigning Values to Metadata Attributes” provides an overview of the Spotlight metadata attributes and creating your own custom attributes.
“Spotlight Importer Schema Format” describes the format of a Spotlight importer schema file.
These articles contain tasks that teach you how to implement metadata importers:
“Spotlight Importer Performance” describes important performance considerations.
“Writing a Spotlight Importer” describes how to write a metadata importer.
“Troubleshooting Spotlight Importers” describes how to test and diagnose problems with your Spotlight importers.
There are other aspects of Spotlight metadata, not covered by this document,that are fundamental to implementing a metadata importer. For example, this document does not explain the commonly used metadata keys or provide guidelines on using those keys to their full potential. Refer to these documents for more details:
Spotlight Overview provides a conceptual overview of Spotlight.
Spotlight Metadata Attributes Reference describes the metadata keys Apple provides.
Last updated: 2009-10-11