Building A Search Interface - Adobe 38043740 - ColdFusion Standard - Mac Development Manual

DEVELOPING COLDFUSION 9 APPLICATIONS
Accessing and Using Data

Building a Search Interface

You can provide a full text search capability for documents and data sources on an Adobe ColdFusion site by enabling
the Verity search engine. Verity full text search lets people visiting your site use simple one- and two-word searches to
quickly find the information they need. You can use the more robust Verity Query Language and the Verity advanced
search operators to transparently implement business-specific meaning behind searches. Verity search allows even one
word searches to return accurate results.
You can build a Verity search interface with which users can perform powerful searches on your site. You also can
index your documents and data sources so that users can search them.
About Verity
To efficiently search through paragraphs of text or files of varying types, you need full-text search capabilities.
ColdFusion includes the Verity search engine, which provides full-text indexing and searching.
The Verity engine performs searches against collections, not against the actual documents. A collection is a special
database created by Verity that contains metadata that describes the documents that you have indexed. The indexing
process examines documents of various types in a collection and creates a metadata description—the index—which is
specialized for rapid search and retrieval operations.
The ColdFusion implementation of Verity supports collections of the following basic data types:
• Text files such as HTML pages and CFML pages
• Binary documents (see "Supported file
• Recordsets returned from a query and CF query object, including:
You can build collections from individual documents or from an entire directory tree. Collections can be stored
anywhere, so you have a great deal of flexibility in accessing indexed data.
In your ColdFusion application, you can search multiple collections, each of which can focus on a specific group of
documents or queries, according to subject, document type, location, or any other logical grouping. Because you can
perform searches against multiple collections, you have substantial flexibility in designing your search interface.
Using Verity with ColdFusion
Here are some ways to use Verity with ColdFusion:
• Index your website and provide a generalized search mechanism, such as a form interface, for executing searches.
• Index specific directories that contain documents for subject-based searching.
• Index specific categories of documents. By organizing your documents into categories, you can let users search
specific types of documents. For example, if your website contains FAQs, documentation, and tutorials, you can
create a search that lets users search within each of these categories.
• Index
recordsets, giving users the ability to search against the data. Because collections contain data
cfquery
optimized for retrieval, this method is much faster than performing multiple database queries to return the same data.
• Index
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• Manage and search collections generated outside ColdFusion using native Verity tools. Collections must be
registered with the Verity K2 administration service. To do this either use the Verity tools, or map the collection
using the
cfcollection
• Index e-mail generated by ColdFusion application pages and create a searching mechanism for the indexed
messages.
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Last updated 1/20/2012
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