Document indexing and searching has always been one of the hidden gems in ColdFusion. Since the early days of ColdFusion, the Verity search technology has been an integral part of creating dynamic, high-function web applications. With the release of ColdFusion MX 7, the ColdFusion development team completely rearchitected this feature from the ground up, using the latest Verity K2 Enterprise release. With this upgrade, ColdFusion MX 7 takes advantage of the latest document filters, features, and capabilities of the best-of-breed Verity technology.

ColdFusion has shipped with the same version of Verity (2.6.1) since ColdFusion 5. For this release, the team updated to the latest Verity release, version 5.5. This version uses a complete client/server paradigm for searching and indexing. The ColdFusion MX code was rewritten to be pure Java. The Verity server components are still platform specific, but you may install them on a different server than the ColdFusion server (feature available only in ColdFusion MX Enterprise). While these architectural changes are important, the most exciting part of this work is that we enhanced the cfsearch and cfindex tags to add new features and functionality available in the new Verity release.

Here is a list of some of the exciting new features:

• Additional search results data: Author, Category, CategoryTree, Context, Rank, Size, and Type
• Enhanced status information from cfindex and cfsearch
• Spelling correction and "Did you mean?" functionality
• Searching within results
• Highlighting search results within the document
• Categories (taxonomies) and hierarchical categories

Let’s take a closer look at each of these new features.

Requirements

While it’s not a requirement, you can download and install ColdFusion to follow along with the article.

ColdFusion MX 7

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