User Guide

150 Developing Web Applications with ColdFusion
Searching a ColdFusion Web Site
Until now, you’ve searched for records in databases based on the value of particular
fields using ODBC. However, to efficiently search through paragraphs of text or files of
varying types requires full-text search capabilites. The Verity, Inc. search engine is
bundled with ColdFusion to provide full-text indexing and searching.
The ColdFusion online documentation employs Verity to allow you to search the
installed document set.
Here are some of the possible uses for Verity in ColdFusion:
• Index your Web site 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 result sets, giving your end users the ability to search against
the data. Since collections are made up of 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 command.
• Index email 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 from both the CFINDEX
and CFSEARCH tags.
Advantages of using Verity
Verity can index the output from queries so that you or an end user can search against
the result sets. This has a clear advantage in speed of execution because pointers to the
result sets are stored in a Verity index that is optimized for searching. You can reduce
the programming overhead of query constructs by allowing users to construct their
own queries and execute them directly. You need only be concerned with presenting
the output to the client browser.
Verity can index database text fields, such as notes and product descriptions, that
cannot be effectively indexed by native database tools.
When indexing collections containing documents in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format,
Verity scans for the document title (if one has been entered in Acrobat Exchange). The
document title displays in the search results list.
Indexing Web pages returns the URL for each document. This is a valuable document
management feature.