Core spotlight ask

Core Spotlight + Ask

Ship local searchable content with Core Spotlight, then optionally ground Apple Intelligence Ask in that index. Prefer Spotlight for discovery; use the language model only to summarize or answer against retrieved hits.

Related skills:

• apple-foundation-models — sessions, availability, prompting, tool-calling rules (not Spotlight-specific)
• native-swiftui — search UI, ContentUnavailableView, redacted placeholders
• swiftui-project-structure — split indexing vs search packages/targets

Agent workflow

1. Split ownership — indexing (build/sync/delete items + reindex extension) separate from query/Ask UI.
2. Choose stable IDs — uniqueIdentifier must round-trip to an app model; use one domainIdentifier per content kind.
3. Index for how users ask — put titles, plain text, short snippets, modification dates, and date/tag keywords into attributes users will query.
4. Sync incrementally — index only changed items (isUpdate), delete removed IDs, report progress to the UI.
5. Add a Spotlight index extension — implement CSIndexExtensionRequestHandler for system-requested reindex.
6. Query with CSUserQuery — call CSUserQuery.prepare() once per process; request the fetchAttributes you need to map results.
7. Filter stale hits — drop Spotlight results whose IDs are unknown to the live vault/library.
8. Fallback ladder — if Spotlight returns nothing: date-aware local scan → keyword scan of on-disk content; label the fallback in UI.
9. Gate Ask on the model — default UX to Ask when SystemLanguageModel is available, else keyword Search.
10. Orchestrate Ask in tiers — iOS 27+ SpotlightSearchTool when available; else search-then-summarize with compact excerpts in the prompt (iOS 26+).
11. Progressive UI — stream note hits as they arrive; keep a Summary section with a redacted placeholder until the model finishes; render summary markdown with AttributedString.

Hard-won rules

Indexing

• Strip markup before indexing (textContent / contentDescription should be plain language).
• Prefixed date prose in textContent (“Date: 4 July 2026 (2026-07-04). …”) plus date keywords (ISO day, year, month name, “Month Year”) makes natural-language date asks work.
• Set contentCreationDate to the semantic document day when that matters more than file birth time (journals, diaries).
• Keep contentDescription short (~snippet length); put the full plain body in textContent.
• Track last-indexed modification times in memory (or durable store) so resync is cheap.
• Spotlight index/delete can fail on Simulator — don’t fail the whole library sync because of that.
• Reindex extension principal class: CSIndexExtensionRequestHandler subclass; extension point com.apple.spotlight.index. Always call the acknowledgement handler.
• Share App Group / bookmarks with the extension when content lives outside the app container.

Query

• Map uniqueIdentifier → app reference; reject unknowns (isKnownNote / knownPaths).
• Prefer ranked CSUserQuery with explicit fetchAttributes (title, textContent, contentDescription, dates).
• Surface indexing progress while the index is incomplete (“Indexing… N of M”); empty Ask results may mean “still indexing,” not “no notes.”

Ask / Foundation Models

• Don’t dump the whole library into the prompt. Retrieve first, then summarize.
• iOS 27+ (when SDK has it): SpotlightSearchTool + LanguageModelSession(tools:) with a short trusted instructions string; observe tool.searchResults to update the notes list before session.respond returns.
• iOS 26 fallback: run the same Spotlight/vault search the Search mode uses, onResultsUpdate immediately, then one-shot LanguageModelSession over numbered title/date/snippet excerpts.
• Wrap 27-only APIs in #if compiler(>=…) and #available(iOS 27, *) so older toolchains still compile.
• Ask instructions: one task (search + brief summary), mention how content is organized/dated, prefer plain language; models may emit light markdown — render it, don’t show raw **.
• Product states: model unavailable, indexing in progress, no hits, tool/search failure, Search-only fallback.

UX

• Show Summary while generating (.redacted(reason: .placeholder) dummy lines), not only after the answer arrives.
• Parse summary with AttributedString(markdown:options: .inlineOnlyPreservingWhitespace) (or equivalent) so bold/italic display correctly.
• Debounce typing for Search; Ask usually runs on submit.
• Demo/screenshot seeds should set query + summary + results without waiting on the model.

Shipping checklist

• Stable uniqueIdentifier + domainIdentifier
• Incremental sync + delete for removed items
• Spotlight index extension handles reindex-all and reindex-by-ID
• CSUserQuery.prepare() once; fetchAttributes cover mapping needs
• Stale-hit filter against live library IDs
• Fallback when Spotlight is empty (with user-visible label)
• Indexing progress exposed to search UI
• Ask gated on model availability; Search still works without AI
• Tiered Ask (Spotlight tool vs search-then-summarize)
• Progressive results + redacted Summary + markdown rendering

Additional resources

• Attribute choices, incremental sync, reindex extension: references/indexing.md
• Query fallbacks, Ask tiers, progressive UI: references/ask-and-query.md
• Core Spotlight: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/corespotlight
• Foundation Models tools: see apple-foundation-models