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Searching iCloud and the Desktop

The Spotlight search capabilities are available on both iOS v5.0 and OS X. Using these search queries iOS can search iCloud content and OS X can search both iCloud, desktop, and networked files.

OS X Search Capabilities

Spotlight is ubiquitous on OS X. The Finder uses it to search for allow the user to search for files. Mail uses Spotlight to find messages during the search process, and any application can use Spotlight to search the User’s home directory, the local file system, any attached networked file systems, and iCloud.

The OS X Objective-C interface to the Spotlight API includes classes to search (NSMetadataQuery), inspect the file metadata (NSMetadataItem), and the ability to have the NSMetadataQuery return a more complicated set of data using the NSMetadataQueryAttributeValueTuple class. In addition a Core Foundation API exists that correspond to each of the Objective-C classes (in fact the classes are built upon the Core Foundation base.

iOS Search Capabilities

iOS allows metadata searches within iCloud to find files corresponding files. It provides only the Objective-C interface to file metadata query, NSMetadataQuery and NSMetadataItem, as well as only supporting the search scope that searches iCloud.

Unlike the desktop, the iOS application’s sandbox is not searchable using the metadata classes. In order to search your application’s sandbox, you will need to traverse the files within the sandbox file system recursively using the NSFileManager class. Once matching file or files is found, you can access that file in the manner that you require. You are also able to use the NSMedatataItem class to retrieve metadata for that particular file.

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