MACROMEDIA COLDFUSION MX 61-DEVELOPING COLDFUSION MX, Develop Manual, Page: 506 / 860

506 Chapter 24: Building a Search Interface
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 types” on page 507 )
•
Record sets returned from
cfquery
,
cfldap
, and
cfpop
queries
You can build collections from individual documents or from an entire directory tree. Collections
can be stored anywhere, so you have much 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 containing documents for subject-based searching.
•
Index
cfquery
record sets, giving users the ability to search against the data. Because
collections contain data optimized for retrieval, this method is much faster than performing
multiple database queries to return the same data.
•
Index
cfldap
and
cfpop
query results.
•
Manage and search collections generated outside of ColdFusion using native Verity tools. This
additional capability requires only that the full path to the collection be specified in the index
and search commands.
•
Index e-mail generated by ColdFusion application pages and create a searching mechanism for
the indexed messages.
•
Build collections of inventory data and make those collections available for searching from
your ColdFusion application pages.
•
Support international users in a range of languages using the
cfindex
,
cfcollection
, and
cfsearch
tags.