The Byte Stops Here

Ok, so you've got Seeker installed, and you're itchin' to get it working. If you remember, we ignored the "demos" subfolder and the "docs" subfolder.

The docs subfolder contains two files, which provide basic information on what's going with Seeker, and some basic information on how to install Seeker. The install documentation is a "bit light" so hopefully you are following my instructions and you should be fine.

Here is how to understand the demos subfolder. Make sure you place the demos subfolder somewhere where it is accessible via a URL on the server Seeker was installed. For me that URL is http://dev01/temp/seeker/demos/. I'll be referencing everything off this URL.

The first file you want to hit is lucene_test.cfm. This file should spit something like this out to you: "Let's see if we can run Lucene, and what version we have... package org.apache.lucene, Lucene Search Engine: core, version 2.3.2". This means you have Seeker installed properly and that ColdFusion can interact with the JAR file properly. So far so good. If you hit an error, go over the install instructions again.

Next, let's test Lucene's indexing of static text and html files. Inside the demos folder, you'll note two subfolders: "files" and "filesIndex". Files is where the text files to be indexed are stored, and fileIndex is where Lucene creates its own index files for the files folder. If you look at the code Ray put together, you can see this is all customizable, and of course this is just for testing purposes at this point. 

So let's do that indexing of the files. Run file_test.cfm. If this is the first time, you should see something similar to this at the top: "Doing index of D:\wwwroot\TEMP\seeker\demos\files to D:\wwwroot\TEMP\seeker\demos\filesindex". This means that Lucene has gone through and created the index files inside the filesIndex folder. If you need to reindex for any reason, simply add this to the URL: file_test.cfm?reindex and it will force a reindex. You should also be seeing a text input box, that will allow you to search against the newly created index. Give it a whirl!

If you want to test further, you can add words, or files, to the files folder, and force a reindex, and do a search again to see if Lucene picked it up. Feel free to try partials like "tes*" without the quotes.

Next, lets take a look at indexing db entries. New ColdFusion installs come with a datasource called "cfartgallery", and that is what Ray uses for his example. But it should be pretty easy to change that and have this example work. So browse to query_test.cfm. You should see a message similar to: "Doing index of db query to D:\wwwroot\TEMP\seeker\demos\dbindex". The query: "select * from art" runs and stores that in Lucene format in the "dbindex" subfolder. Again, you should also be seeing a text input box, that will allow you to search against the newly created index. Give it a whirl!

You can also force the same reindex after adding or editing records in the DB. And the same goes for partial searches.

Next, I'll probably a larger test and compare with Verity, and also look at the inside of Seeker, and see how its functioning. In the mean time, enjoy!