Re: Make sqlite3 database searchable on Mac OS X
Jens Alfke <jens-mAcipnqRhZf2eFz/[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.db.sqlite.general |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
> On Feb 10, 2020, at 8:10 PM, Peng Yu <[email protected]> wrote: > > It seems that sqlite3 databases are not searchable by Spotlight on Mac > OS X. Is there a way to make them searchable? Thanks. How would Spotlight know what tables or columns to index? It doesn't understand what database schema mean, and it can't tell a column with user-visible text apart from one with internal info. You can write a Spotlight indexer plugin for your application that recognizes your file type and scans your SQLite database to generate indexing data. The downside is that Spotlight is fundamentally file-based: it considers a file to be a single entity. So when the user searches for something that's in your database, it will just show the database file as a hit. It won't show separate results for every row that matches. (Some apps work around this by creating stub files in a hidden directory, one file per entity. All these files need to contain is a record identifier so your indexer can index the file by looking at the corresponding row in the database. Spotlight will return the stub file as a match; when your app is told to open it, it looks at its record ID and displays the corresponding database row in its UI. Apple Mail is an example; there's a directory somewhere in ~/Library/Mail that contains an empty file for every email message.) —Jens PS: Disclaimer: My knowledge of Spotlight is years out of date; it may be that it's advanced since then. _______________________________________________ sqlite-users mailing list [email protected] http://mailinglists.sqlite.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users