Search Kit

Overview

Search Kit is a powerful and streamlined C language framework for indexing and searching text in most human languages. It provides fast information retrieval in System Preferences, Address Book, Help Viewer, and Xcode. Apple’s Spotlight technology is built on top of Search Kit to provide content searching in Finder, Mail, and the Spotlight menu.

You can use Search Kit or Spotlight to provide similar functionality and powerful information-access capabilities within your Mac OS X application. The Search Kit API is appropriate when you want your application to have full control over indexing and searching, and when your focus is file content. Search Kit is thread-safe and works with Cocoa, Carbon, and command-line tools.

Beginning with Mac OS X version 10.4, Search Kit supports phrase searches, prefix/suffix/substring searches, improved Boolean searches, and improved relevance ranking. Search Kit now uses Spotlight’s metadata importers when indexing documents, and takes advantage of any additional importers available on a system. Searching and indexing are much faster with Search Kit’s new asynchronous search APIs. And, starting in Mac OS X v10.4, Search Kit provides a summarization API that supplants Find By Content.

Overview

Search Kit is a powerful and streamlined C language framework for indexing and searching text in most human languages. It provides fast information retrieval in System Preferences, Address Book, Help Viewer, and Xcode. Apple’s Spotlight technology is built on top of Search Kit to provide content searching in Finder, Mail, and the Spotlight menu.

You can use Search Kit or Spotlight to provide similar functionality and powerful information-access capabilities within your Mac app. Search Kit is appropriate when you want your application to have full control over indexing and searching, and when your focus is file content. Search Kit is thread-safe and works with Cocoa and command-line tools.

Search Kit supports phrase searches, prefix/suffix/substring searches, Boolean searches, summarization, and relevance ranking. Search Kit uses Spotlight’s metadata importers when indexing documents and takes advantage of any additional importers available on a system.

Topics

Creating, Opening, and Closing Indexes

• SKIndexCreateWithURL(_:_:_:_:)
• SKIndexCreateWithMutableData(_:_:_:_:)
• SKIndexOpenWithData(_:_:)
• SKIndexOpenWithMutableData(_:_:)
• SKIndexOpenWithURL(_:_:_:)
• SKIndexClose(_:)
• SKIndexGetIndexType(_:)
• SKIndexGetTypeID()

Managing Indexes

• SKIndexAddDocumentWithText(_:_:_:_:)
• SKIndexAddDocument(_:_:_:_:)
• SKIndexFlush(_:)
• SKIndexCompact(_:)
• SKIndexGetDocumentCount(_:)
• SKIndexGetMaximumDocumentID(_:)
• SKIndexGetMaximumTermID(_:)
• SKIndexDocumentIteratorCreate(_:_:)
• SKIndexDocumentIteratorCopyNext(_:)
• SKIndexDocumentIteratorGetTypeID()
• SKIndexGetAnalysisProperties(_:)
• SKIndexMoveDocument(_:_:_:)
• SKIndexRemoveDocument(_:_:)
• SKIndexRenameDocument(_:_:_:)
• SKIndexSetMaximumBytesBeforeFlush(_:_:)
• SKIndexGetMaximumBytesBeforeFlush(_:)

Working With Text Importers

• SKLoadDefaultExtractorPlugIns()

Working with Documents and Terms

• SKDocumentCreateWithURL(_:)
• SKDocumentCreate(_:_:_:)
• SKDocumentCopyURL(_:)
• SKDocumentGetName(_:)
• SKDocumentGetParent(_:)
• SKDocumentGetSchemeName(_:)
• SKDocumentGetTypeID()
• SKIndexCopyDocumentForDocumentID(_:_:)
• SKIndexCopyInfoForDocumentIDs(_:_:_:_:_:)
• SKIndexCopyDocumentRefsForDocumentIDs(_:_:_:_:)
• SKIndexCopyDocumentURLsForDocumentIDs(_:_:_:_:)
• SKIndexCopyDocumentIDArrayForTermID(_:_:)
• SKIndexCopyTermIDArrayForDocumentID(_:_:)
• SKIndexCopyTermStringForTermID(_:_:)
• SKIndexGetTermIDForTermString(_:_:)
• SKIndexSetDocumentProperties(_:_:_:)
• SKIndexCopyDocumentProperties(_:_:)
• SKIndexGetDocumentState(_:_:)
• SKIndexGetDocumentTermCount(_:_:)
• SKIndexGetDocumentTermFrequency(_:_:_:)
• SKIndexGetTermDocumentCount(_:_:)
• SKIndexGetDocumentID(_:_:)

Fast Asynchronous Searching

• SKSearchCreate(_:_:_:)
• SKSearchFindMatches(_:_:_:_:_:_:)
• SKSearchCancel(_:)
• SKSearchGetTypeID()

Working With Summarization

• SKSummaryCreateWithString(_:)
• SKSummaryGetSentenceSummaryInfo(_:_:_:_:_:)
• SKSummaryGetParagraphSummaryInfo(_:_:_:_:)
• SKSummaryGetSentenceCount(_:)
• SKSummaryGetParagraphCount(_:)
• SKSummaryCopySentenceAtIndex(_:_:)
• SKSummaryCopyParagraphAtIndex(_:_:)
• SKSummaryCopySentenceSummaryString(_:_:)
• SKSummaryCopyParagraphSummaryString(_:_:)
• SKSummaryGetTypeID()

Callbacks

• SKSearchResultsFilterCallBack

Data Types

• SKDocument
• SKIndexDocumentIterator
• SKIndex
• SKSearch
• SKSummary
• SKDocumentID
• SKSearchResults
• SKSearchGroup

Constants

• Text Analysis Keys
• SKDocumentIndexState
• SKSearchOptions
• SKIndexType
• SKSearchType
• kSKDocumentStateAddPending
• kSKDocumentStateDeletePending
• kSKDocumentStateIndexed
• kSKDocumentStateNotIndexed
• kSKIndexInverted
• kSKIndexInvertedVector
• kSKIndexUnknown
• kSKIndexVector
• kSKSearchBooleanRanked
• kSKSearchPrefixRanked
• kSKSearchRanked
• kSKSearchRequiredRanked

See Also

Related Documentation

• Search Kit Programming Guide