A tool to help with analyzing the Lucene-based text indexes in BlueDragon: Luke

Those leveraging Lucene, the text indexing capability built into BlueDragon (which is built upon Lucene), and indeed those using Lucene on their own with ColdFusion or otherwise, may be interested to learn of Luke, whose site describes it as "a handy development and diagnostic tool, which accesses already existing Lucene indexes and allows you to display and modify their contents in several ways":

• browse by document number, or by term
• view documents / copy to clipboard
• retrieve a ranked list of most frequent terms
• execute a search, and browse the results
• analyze search results
• selectively delete documents from the index
• reconstruct the original document fields, edit them and re-insert to the index
• optimize indexes
• and much more...

To learn more and download the free tool, see:

http://www.getopt.org/luke/

Scroll down to the bottom of that page to see screenshots of the tools use. (Heard about Luke today in a thread on the CFAussie list which was discussing Lucene generically. Thanks, to Toby there.)

You'll want to point Luke to whatever directory is holding your Lucene collection. In BlueDragon, those are stored in the work/cfcollection directory of your BlueDragon installation (one directory per indexed collection).

The "documents" view in Luke may be most useful for starters, as it allows you to see each "record" in the index. And the "search" view offers a means to search the index to find which records contain a given term (to simulate what CFSEARCH would find). You'll likely want to set its "default field" to "contents". See the Luke site and docs for still more useful insights available.

To backup a step, for those who don't know, what this is all about is that BlueDragon does indeed support text (and query) indexing and searching using CFINDEX, CFSEARCH, etc, but it doesn't bundle the Verity engine used in CF. Instead it uses Lucene, an open source project. You can learn more about this in our docs and in this FAQ:

http://www.newatlanta.com/c/products/bluedragon/self_help/faq/detail?faqId=323