what is an indexed property
Asked on 06/13/2025
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An indexed property in the context of Apple's WWDC sessions refers to a property of an app entity that is indexed for search purposes, particularly in Spotlight. By indexing properties, you can enhance the searchability and discoverability of your app's content within the system. This is achieved by associating properties of your app entities with Spotlight attribute keys, allowing the system to automatically generate actions like "Find" actions in Shortcuts.
For example, in the session "Develop for Shortcuts and Spotlight with App Intents," it is mentioned that you can use the new indexing key parameter to associate properties from your entity to the corresponding attribute key on the Spotlight entity. This allows for more relevant search results and actions based on indexed properties.
If you want to learn more about how to implement this, you can refer to the session Develop for Shortcuts and Spotlight with App Intents (00:09:02).
Get to know App Intents
Learn about the App Intents framework and its increasingly critical role within Apple’s developer platforms. We’ll take you through a ground-up introduction of the core concepts: intents, entities, queries, and much more. You’ll learn how these pieces fit together and let you integrate your app through Apple’s devices, from software features like Spotlight and Shortcuts to hardware features like the Action button. We’ll also walk through how App Intents is your app’s gateway to integrating with Apple Intelligence going forward.
Develop for Shortcuts and Spotlight with App Intents
Learn about how building App Intents that make actions available and work best with the new features in Shortcuts and Spotlight on Mac. We’ll show you how your actions combine in powerful ways with the new Apple Intelligence actions available in the Shortcuts app. We’ll deep-dive into how the new “Use Model” action works, and how it interacts with your app’s entities. And we’ll discuss how to use the App Intents APIs to make your actions available in Spotlight.
What’s new in App Intents
Learn about improvements and all-new features with App Intents, and discover how this framework can help you expose your app’s functionality to Siri, Spotlight, Shortcuts, and more. We’ll show you how to make your entities more meaningful to the platform with the Transferable API, File Representations, new IntentFile APIs, and Spotlight Indexing, opening up powerful functionality in Siri and the Shortcuts app. Empower your intents to take people deep into your app with URL Representable Entities. Explore new techniques to model your entities and intents with new APIs for error handling and union values.