Verity K2 Spider allows a searchable collection to be created from dynamic webpages. The Verity spider actually crawls your website unlike the basic Verity indexing. This means you can index and search dynamic database driven webpages along with static webpages. I had a hard time finding all the CF7 spider info I needed in one spot, so here is an example of how to set up a Verity Spider Collection in ColdFusion7.

(I have created an spider search example page that has indexed a small number of dynamic webpages and you can download example vspider code and ColdFusion cfsearch code.)

Before you start you need to visit this webpage http://www.macromedia.com/go/50f419a and download the Verity Spider styles. Verity Spider will not work without that style folder added. For this demo just download the files and place them in the folder, you do not need to follow their entire example although it is very close to this example.

Once you have added that style folder it’s time to create a collection. The vspider utility will create the spider collection. vspider is located in Windows here: [ColdFusion7Root]\verity\k2\_nti40\bin\

The vspider must be configured and run in command line or in windows with a BAT file. Here is an example of a BAT file that will spider an entire localhost website. *Note this must be on ONE LINE

Options explanation:
  -style: required location of verity spider K2 style directory
  -collection: location where collection will be created
  -start: where to start
  -cgiok: index CGI type webpages ie: index.cfm?event=this&other=that
  -indmimeinclude text/* : index text based files only
  -indmimeexclude text/css: do not index CSS files
This is a small list of options available, for a complete list of vspider options visit: http://livedocs.macromedia.com/coldfusion/7/htmldocs/00001780.htm

If you want to search a subdirectory and not the entire website then modify the -start option and add the -include line:

You can also reference an ini file with settings if your command line is too long. In example below the ini file would contain all the other options.

When run the vspider will index all the pages based on the options you give it. It will bring up a window that looks like this:

Once the vspider has run there should be a directory full of folders and files in the –collection directory assigned in the vspider command.

Now we need to index the collection so the cfsearch tag can be used. At this point the collection exists but ColdFusion cannot search it. So open the CF admin and go to the “Verity Collections” page. Add a new englishx collection, in the example below the collection name is “recycle”. Note that the Path does not include the collection name itself, that is added from the collection Name.

Now click “create collection” to index that collection. When it is complete you should see the number of documents in the collection. That’s it the collection is indexed and ready for the cfsearch tag. Once indexed the collection should look like this in the CF admin:

Now it’s time to create a search page using the cfsearch tag. In ColdFusion7 it’s now possible to add spelling suggestion and to highlight matched words, so lets do that too. Here is a very basic ColdFusion search piece of code to search a collection called “recycle”. It will make a spelling suggestion if there is only 1 result and it will return any spelling suggestions in a variable called “info”.

Above is a very basic example. Here is a live example of a verity spider search page.

Download code from live example.

This is a very basic example, but the above vspider command should get you up and running with a K2 collection. Once you create a collection you will find you will need to tweak the options for your needs. If you have questions please leave a comment or email me.