Programming ColdFusion

Chapter 16. Working with the Verity Search Interface

There is hardly a useful web site out there that doesn’t contain a mechanism for allowing users to search through the site for information they are interested in. Not to be left out, ColdFusion comes bundled with a set of tags that leverage Verity Developer’s Kit (VDK) 2.6.1 technology^[14] to allow you to build powerful search interfaces into your own ColdFusion applications.

This chapter covers methods for setting up and indexing searchable collections using the ColdFusion Administrator and various CFML tags. Once you are familiar with these operations, we will explore techniques for searching collections and returning search results. Additional techniques for maintaining and optimizing collections are also discussed. The chapter concludes with several advanced techniques including methods for synchronizing database and document collections and scheduling automatic indexing of your data.

In addition to the VDK 2.6.1 engine, ColdFusion 5.0 comes with a restricted version of Verity’s enterprise-level K2 server. The K2 server offers features that appeal to large scale and clustered sites such as simultaneous searching of distributed collections, concurrent queries, and an overall performance gain over VDK 2.6.1 of approximately ten-fold. The version of K2 server that comes with ColdFusion is limited to searching 250,000 documents for ColdFusion Enterprise and 125,000 documents for ColdFusion professional. Users of Allaire’s Spectra ...