How to donate IndexedEntity, if required in iOS 26

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Jordan OP

Created 3w

Replies 2

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In the Get to Know App Intents WWDC session, it was said

New this year, you can now add Spotlight indexing keys directly on properties. Annotating properties allows Spotlight to show more relevant information to customers. When donating indexed entities, the framework will handle creating the searchable item and attribute set for you. After donating entities, they can be found in Spotlight.

How do you donate indexed app entities?

Making app entities available in Spotlight seems to state it's not necessary to donate entities:

The system can automatically extract the keys for Spotlight indexing at compile time and store them in the App Intents metadata that Xcode generates as part of your app’s bundle. As a result, Spotlight indexing is faster and can find your app entities without launching your app, and without you having to explicitly donate the entities to Spotlight. You also don’t need to manually update or remove entities from the Spotlight index when your app’s data changes.

Say I have a CarEntity. The user can create/update/delete cars at any time. What is the modern way to get cars to appear in Spotlight in iOS 26?

Answered by DTS Engineer in 845722022

Any insight into the documentation seemingly contradicting the need to index (donate)?

I took a read through the documents you cited earlier, and I can see why its confusing. The goal of IndexedEntity is so that you don't need to separately donate your app's content to Spotlight. For apps with large or complex data models, you're abstracting the details from your data model into an AppEntity, and then you don't need to do the same thing with a separate abstraction to map your model into a CSSearchableItemAttributeSet, which is what you may have done before IndexedEntity was available.

— Ed Ford,  DTS Engineer

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Answer 1

DTS Engineer OP

Apple

3w

How do you donate indexed app entities?

Here's a snippet from a sample code project:

static func donateLandmarks(modelData: ModelData) async throws {
        let landmarkEntities = await modelData.landmarkEntities
        try await CSSearchableIndex.default().indexAppEntities(landmarkEntities)
    }

— Ed Ford,  DTS Engineer

0

Answer 2

DTS Engineer OP

Apple

3w

Accepted Answer

Any insight into the documentation seemingly contradicting the need to index (donate)?

I took a read through the documents you cited earlier, and I can see why its confusing. The goal of IndexedEntity is so that you don't need to separately donate your app's content to Spotlight. For apps with large or complex data models, you're abstracting the details from your data model into an AppEntity, and then you don't need to do the same thing with a separate abstraction to map your model into a CSSearchableItemAttributeSet, which is what you may have done before IndexedEntity was available.

— Ed Ford,  DTS Engineer

0