Sonny Software

Is there any way that Spotlight could search Bookends databases for individual records (similar to the way the address book gets searched for individual entries, for example)?

Thanks,

Dan

Not with the current Spotlight as I understand it -- it indexes individual files, not monolithic databases. I've heard this might change in the future, though.

Jon
Sonny Software

hmm AFAIK doing a spotlight importer for bookends is not that of a problem if you don't need a change in bookends to be reflected immediately in spotlight. all you had to do was to maintain some sort of xml database, where bookends puts a text only copy of every single item in its database, with some pointer or way to directly open a bookends item by sending its ID to bookends...

in other words: its pretty similar to exporting vcards... a make do solution is to export all data as vcards, which makes them available from within spotlight instantly. of course, some fields might miss or be shortened...

Yes, that's a clever idea that would (mostly) work (mostly because as you say, vcards have a limit to the size of their fields).

Jon
Sonny Software

Jon wrote:Not with the current Spotlight as I understand it -- it indexes individual files, not monolithic databases. I've heard this might change in the future, though.

Do you think it would be possible to follow the example of an application such as the MacOS X Address Book, which has a monolithic database but which is nevertheless indexed by Spotlight? The trick is to have individual files for each record in the monolithic database -- these are tucked away, for example, in an Application Support folder (Bookends already has an "attachments folder"), and they are indexed by Spotlight. When you choose one of these in a Spotlight "hit" list, Spotlight tells the app to open that record.

And what would the purpose of this be? Why isn't it enough just to perform a search within Bookends? The whole point of Spotlight, as I see it, is to be able to search for everything from one common interface.

The overhead for that for Address Book is neglibible. For Bookends it would be enormous. And the gain minimal.

Jon
Sonny Software