react-native-spotlight-search

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A React Native module for iOS that provides Spotlight search functionality. This allows you to index content from within your React Native app so that it appears in the iOS device's Spotlight search index, potentially increasing the exposure of your app.

Current Features

• Adding items.
• Updating items.
• Deleting items.
• Register a callback to handle when a search item is tapped.
• Support for images

Installation

With yarn (recommended): $ yarn add react-native-spotlight-search

Or with NPM: $ npm install react-native-spotlight-search --save

iOS

Expo

Prebuild Plugin

This package cannot be used in the "Expo Go" app because it requires custom native code.

After installing this npm package, add the config plugin to the plugins array of your app.json or app.config.js:

{
  "expo": {
    "plugins": ["react-native-spotlight-search"]
  }
}

Next, rebuild your app as described in the "Adding custom native code" guide.

RN >= 0.60

Auto linking or Manually below

RN < 0.60

react-native link react-native-spotlight-search or Manually below

Simply add RCTSpotlightSearch.xcodeproj to Libraries and add libRCTSpotlightSearch.a to Link Binary With Libraries under Build Phases. More info and screenshots about how to do this is available in the React Native documentation.

In Your AppDelegate (Optional)

If you wish to be able to handle search item tapped callbacks, you'll need to add the following code to your AppDelegate file:

#import "RCTSpotlightSearch.h"

- (BOOL)application:(UIApplication *)application continueUserActivity:(nonnull NSUserActivity *)userActivity restorationHandler:(nonnull void (^)(NSArray * _Nullable))restorationHandler {
  [RCTSpotlightSearch handleContinueUserActivity:userActivity];
  return YES;
}

If Xcode complains about being unable to find the header file, please ensure that your project's header search includes the following:

$(SRCROOT)/../node_modules/react-native-spotlight-search

Like this:

Usage

First up, import the module:

import SpotlightSearch from "react-native-spotlight-search";

Indexing Items

You can either add an array of items:

SpotlightSearch.indexItems([
  {
    title: "Strawberry",
    contentDescription: "A sweet and juicy fruit.",
    uniqueIdentifier: "1",
    domain: "fruit",
    thumbnailName: "strawberry",
  },
  {
    title: "Kiwi",
    contentDescription: "Not a type of bird.",
    uniqueIdentifier: "2",
    domain: "fruit",
    thumbnailName: "kiwi",
  },
]);

Or individual items:

SpotlightSearch.indexItem({
  title: "Strawberry",
  contentDescription: "A sweet and juicy fruit.",
  uniqueIdentifier: "1",
  thumbnailName: "strawberry",
});

Search Item Properties

Property	Description	Type	Required
title	The title of the search item.	string	Yes
contentDescription	A description which appears below the title in the search results.	string	No
uniqueIdentifier	A unique and stable identifier. Used to refer to the item.	string	Yes
domain	A string for grouping related items together in a way that makes sense. Not displayed to the user.	string	Yes
thumbnailName	A local file name/key to a thumbnail image. See A Note About Thumbnails.	string	No
thumbnailData	A base64 string representation of a thumbnail image. See A Note About Thumbnails.	string	No
keywords	An array of keywords which can be used to help inform the search index. Not visible to the user.	[string]	No

Updating Items

Simply use the same method as adding items. Be sure to reference the same key when indexing the item so that any new metadata changes will be reflected in the Spotlight index.

Removing Items

Items can be removed by identifier:

SpotlightSearch.deleteItemsWithIdentifiers(["1", "2"]);

Or by domain:

SpotlightSearch.deleteItemsInDomains(["fruit"]);

Alternatively, you can delete all items indexed by your app:

SpotlightSearch.deleteAllItems();

Promises

All API index and delete methods are asynchronous and return promises. You can chain things like this:

SpotlightSearch.deleteAllItems().then(() => {
  SpotlightSearch.indexItem({
    title: "Strawberry",
    contentDescription: "A sweet and juicy fruit.",
    uniqueIdentifier: "1",
    thumbnailName: "strawberry",
  });
});

Handling User Interactions

You can choose to add a custom handler that will be invoked in the event of a user tapping one of the search items in the Spotlight results:

SpotlightSearch.searchItemTapped((uniqueIdentifier) => {
  alert(`You tapped on ${uniqueIdentifier}!`);
});

Optionally, if you want to capture the search item that was tapped to open the app (perhaps the listener was set after the event was triggered):

SpotlightSearch.getInitialSearchItem().then((uniqueIdentifier) => {
  alert(`You tapped on ${uniqueIdentifier} and opened the app!`);
});

// example in a useEffect with listener cleanup
useEffect(() => {
    const spotlightListener = SpotlightSearch.searchItemTapped((uniqueIdentifier) => {
        alert(`You tapped on ${uniqueIdentifier} and opened the app!`);
    })
    return () => {
        // cleanup listener
        spotlightListener.remove()
    }
}, [])

The parameter will be the uniqueIdentifier that the item was indexed with. You can use this to lookup the item and display information about it, e.g. by navigating to a relevant page in your app.

A Note About Thumbnails

Currently, in order to use an image path it must exist locally on the device in the project assets folder. This is a limitation of iOS rather than of this library.

To use images that are not in your assets folder (local or remote files), read them as base64 and include the string value using the thumbnailData property.

To-do

• Support additional built in types (location etc).
• Public links.
• Initial release.
• New iOS 10 features.

PRs welcome ❤️