MacOS X Developer Preview 4 Release Notes Copyright © 2000 by Apple Computer, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
The Find by Content framework provides indexing and searching of the text content of files. Initially, its only client is the Sherlock application, but it provides a public API that can be used by any application running on OS X.
In this release, indexing is manually controlled via the Sherlock user interface, and the public API provides the FBCIndexItems() call for indexing a folder. The header file is FindByContent.h. Note that the header file is in the Carbon headers, but FindByContent is a separate framework in this release.
Indexing is on a folder basis, unlike Mac OS 9 where it is on a volume basis. Any folder can be indexed if the user requesting indexing has write permission in that folder; this includes writable folders elsewhere on the network, such as a user's remote Home Directory. Indexes are stored in the folders that they refer to, and thus remain valid when a folder is copied or moved. In this release it is not yet possible to create a private index for a non-writable folder.
Index formats are completely different from Mac OS 9. The Mac OS 9 version of Find by Content does not see the indexes created by the Mac OS X version. In this release, the Mac OS X version also does not see indexes created by the Mac OS 9 version.
Searching via Sherlock is the same as on Mac OS 9. However, the user interface does not yet provide language choices. Therefore all indexing and searching is set up to work with text written in any of the Western European languages, and other languages are not yet supported.