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Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Returning More Detailed Information with New Search Result Data
  3. Suggesting Corrected Spelling with the "Did you mean?" Functionality
  4. Using Categories

Creating Better Search Functionality and Indexed Collections with ColdFusion MX 7

Returning More Detailed Information with New Search Result Data

ColdFusion MX 7 can return more detailed information about each document returned by a user’s searches.

The query returned from cfsearch has the following new columns:
Variable Description
Author The Verity derived author of this document
Category A comma separated list of categories for this document, as specified on index
CategoryTree The hierarchical category string for this document, as specified on index
Context A context summary containing the search terms, highlighted in bold (by default)
Custom3,Custom4 Two additional custom fields for application specific uses
Rank The rank of this document in the search results
Size The number of bytes in the index document
Type The MIME type of the document indexed

One of the more popular requests we received from ColdFusion developers using searching and indexing was that they wanted more (preferably unlimited!) custom fields. Well, we weren’t able to provide unlimited custom fields, but we added two more. Additionally, where possible, we passed along information (such as author) that was already contained in the index.

Using Enhanced Status Information

With the enhanced cfsearch tag, you can find out how many documents were searched, how many were found, and how long the search took. By setting the status attribute in the cfsearch tag, you can specify a variable name, in this case, info, that the tag uses to return information about the search.

<cfsearch status="info" 
	collection="mycol" 
	criteria="#Form.query#">
<cfoutput>
 Found: #info.FOUND# documents<br>
 Searched: #info.SEARCHED# documents<br>
 Search time: #info.TIME# milliseconds<br>
</cfoutput>
The cfsearch tag returns the info variable to store the status structure, which has the following keys:
Variable Description
Found The number of documents that contain the search criteria
Searched The number of documents searched. Corresponds to the "RecordsSearched" column in the search results
Time The number of milliseconds the search took, as reported by the Verity K2 search service
SuggestedQuery An alternate query, as suggested by Verity, that may produce better (more) results; often corrected spelling suggestions for search terms
Keywords A structure that contains each search term as a key to an array of up to five possible alternative terms, in order of preference. Keyword is only present only when the suggestions tag attribute criteria is met in the cfsearch tag.
KeywordScore A structure that mirrors the Keywords structure, and contains the Verity generated "score" of each of the alternate keywords, on a 0 to 99 point scale.

Figure 1 shows a status structure, including suggestions for alternate search terms.

The status structure

Figure 1. The status structure

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