Spotlight Importers/OpenOffice

After I have read that since version 1.2 EagleFiler makes use of installed Spotlight importers to index documents it doesn’t understand itself, I just had to test this. So I created an OpenOffice document, and imported it into an EagleFiler library. However, when I then searched for a phrase that I put into the document, it didn’t show up as search result. Spotlight itself, however, found the document, so the importer definitely works.

Did I miss something here, or should EagleFiler really be able to index that document?

Now this is just a wild guess, but maybe it’s useful: OpenOffice saves its documents as zip files (just with a different file extension). Maybe EagleFiler detects this and tries to extract the content, instead of just using the importer on the file itself?

(I used EagleFiler 1.2.7 for this test)

Best regards
Rolf

Which version of Mac OS X are you using? On 10.5, I created a .odt file using TextEdit, and I can find it with both EagleFiler and Spotlight. On 10.4, there is no OS-supplied Spotlight importer, and I don’t think the OpenOffice application supplies one, either.

EagleFiler’s use of Spotlight importers has a limitation that phrase searches might not work properly. You may have better luck searching for the keywords without quotation marks. An upcoming version of EagleFiler will address this by providing native support for the Open Document format.

I’m still on OSX 10.4, so there’s no native odt support.
However, NeoOffice (the OpenOffice port I’m using), provides a Spotlight importer. That’s how I was able to find my document with Spotlight.
When searching from inside EagleFiler, I always did so without quotation marks, and entered just a single keyword.
So it seems that EagleFiler for some reason doesn’t use that importer. Is there some information (e.g. a log file) that would help you to analyze the problem?

I was using OpenOffice Aqua. I’ve downloaded NeoOffice and am seeing the same behavior on 10.4 that you did. The Spotlight importer seems to work, at least for Spotlight itself. I’ve verified that EagleFiler is asking the OS to get the text of the file using the Spotlight importers, but it’s not returning any text and not reporting an error. So I’m not sure where the problem is, but it’s probably in the OS (the particular API that EagleFiler is using was already buggy in Tiger, but fixed in Leopard) or in NeoOffice.

EagleFiler 1.4 adds support for the OpenDocument Text format (requires Mac OS X 10.5).