Addons

You can extend the capabilities of metaindex to index additional file types (indexers) and to format raw metadata values in a human readable form (humanizers) by writing addons.

These should be placed in ~/.local/share/metaindex/addons/ and will be loaded upon start of metaindex.

Beware that these addons can do whatever they want. They might encrypt all your files or even first upload them to the internet. Never copy untrusted python files into the addons folder.

Additional Indexers

Addons must be derived from metaindex.indexer.IndexerBase. Here is a very stupid example of a working indexer that adds the subject stupid to every file:

from metaindex.indexer import IndexerBase, Order


class StupidIndexer(IndexerBase):
    NAME = 'stupid'
    ACCEPT = '*'
    ORDER = Order.FIRST
    PREFIX = 'extra'

    def run(self, path, metadata, last_cached):
        metadata.add(self.PREFIX + '.subject', 'stupid')

path is the pathlib.Path to the file that is to be indexed, info is a CacheEntry of already obtained metadata from previously run indexers, and last_cached is the metadata information of path as it is currently in the cache (in case you need to compare to previous values).

If you want your indexer to only run if the file at path has changed since the last run of the indexers (any indexers, really), you can use the @only_if_changed decorator.

If your indexer can extract the full (human readable) text from the file, be sure to query self.should_fulltext(path) if you should do it.

The same goes for OCR’ing images of the file being indexed. Please query self.should_ocr(path) if the user really wanted this to go through OCR.

Any extracted fulltext should by convention be stored in a metadata tag that ends with .fulltext, e.g. msdoc.fulltext if your indexer uses the prefix msdoc.

Please see metaindex.indexer.IndexerBase for more details and metaindex.indexers for existing indexers as examples.

Additional Humanizers

A humanizer is a simple function that turns a raw metadata value into a human-readable form.

Here is an example of a humanizer that would render any .round tag as π if the value is a float and close enough to 3.14:

from metaindex.humanizer import register_humanizer, Priority

@register_humanizer('*.round', Priority.HIGH)
def format_pi(value):
    if isinstance(value, float) and abs(3.14 - value) < 0.001:
        return 'π'
    return None

Have a look at the API of register_humanizer for all details on what options you have to write your own humanizers.