ColdFusion s Verity Search Engine Architecture

ColdFusion's Verity Search Engine Architecture

ColdFusion MX 7 comes with its own search server, called the Verity Search Server. The Verity application runs separately from ColdFusion and stores the page metadata in indexes called collections. When a search request is presented to ColdFusion with the <cfsearch> tag along with a collection attribute, it hands off the search criteria to the Verity Search Server. Verity then searches the collections for the site and returns any corresponding metadata back to ColdFusion. ColdFusion then builds the results page based on that metadata for the visitor to review (see Figure 20.5).

Figure 20.5. The search request and results delivery process using Verity.

For the collections to be searchable, however, there must first be data stored in them. Populating this data is done in one of two ways. The easiest method is via the ColdFusion Administrator, which handles the indexing of any collections created with the Administrator.

The second option is to use the command-line interface to create the collection and to index the site. Verity comes with its own search spider, called vspider, that can scan all the pages and files within your website, including Microsoft Office documents, WordPerfect, text, and PDF documents, and include their contents in the collections. The only drawback, however, is that by default the vspider is not capable of indexing collections created within the ColdFusion Administrator. You can, however, make modifications to ColdFusion and Verity that allow vspider to index these collections.

Tip

For instructions on configuring vspider to search collections created within the ColdFusion Administrator, check out the ColdFusion TechNote located at http://www.macromedia.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=50f419a.