MACROMEDIA COLDFUSION MX 61-DEVELOPING COLDFUSION MX, Develop Manual

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Creating a search tool for ColdFusion applications 513
Note: You can map a collection currently available on your network or local disk by creating a local
reference (an alias) for that collection. In this procedure, enter the collection alias as the collection
name, and enter a UNC (Universal Naming Convention) path to the folder for the collection.
You have successfully created a collection, DemoDocs, that currently has no data. A collection
becomes populated with data when you index it. For more information, see the next section,
“About indexing a collection” on page 513 .
About indexing a collection
A new collection is an empty shell that must be indexed before you search it. The indexing
procedure also populates the collection with data contained in the collection’s files. Similar to
creating a collection, you can index a collection either in the ColdFusion MX Administrator or
programmatically.
Note: You can index and search against collections created outside of ColdFusion by using the
external attribute of cfindex and cfsearch .
Use the following guidelines to determine which method to use:
The
cfcollection
tag has the following
action
attribute values that can fix or improve your
index:
•
repair
Repairs the internal index files of a collection. This might take a few minutes for large
collections.
•
optimize Optimizes a collection. Use this if you notice that your searches on a collection
take longer than previously.
Updating an index
Documents are modified frequently in many user environments. After you index your
documents, any changes that you make are not reflected in subsequent Verity searches until you
reindex the collection. Depending on your environment, you can create a scheduled task to
automatically keep your indexes current. For more information on scheduled tasks, see
Configuring and Administering ColdFusion MX .
Use the Administrator Use the cfindex tag
To index document files To index ColdFusion query results
When the collection does not require
frequent updates When the collection requires frequent updates
To create the collection without writing any
CFML code To dynamically update a collection from a ColdFusion
application page
To create a collection once When the collection requires updating by others