Advanced ColdFusion Administration
Managing Verity Collections with the mkvdk Utility

Overview of the Verity mkvdk Utility

The mkvdk utility is an indexing application, provided with other Verity utilities, that can be used in various ways to create and maintain collections. It is a command line utility that can be used within other applications or shell scripts to provide more sophisticated scheduling and other capabilities.

mkvdk can be found in the ColdFusion bin directory:

• cfusion\bin (Windows)
• opt/coldfusion/verity/<platform>/bin (Linux, UNIX), where <platform> is _ssol26, _hpux11, or _iLnx21.

mkvdk syntax

The following is the basic syntax of the command:

mkvdk -collection path [option] [dockey]

Multiple options and dockeys can be included, as needed. If dockey is a list of files, it should consist of an at-sign (@) followed by the filename that contains a simple list of files, as in @filelist. The options for mkvdk are described in .

The following operations occur when you use mkvdk to create a new collection:

1. New collection directories are created and the specified style files are copied to the style subdirectory.
2. The style file settings are read and the required information is passed to the Verity search engine.
3. The gateway is used to open the document files, which are parsed according to the settings in various style files.
4. A new partition is created, which includes an index and an attribute table.
5. Assist data is generated, which may include a spanning word list.

When problems occur during an operation, mkvdk writes error messages to the system log file (sysinfo.log). You can direct error and other messages to the console by using mkvdk with the -outlevel option. You can direct messages to a file of your choice by using the -loglevel and -logfile options.

The format of the log file is shown below:

You can use the log file to view details about what happens during the collection building process. Use the mkvdk -loglevel command and specify the numeric identifier for the message level you want, as summarized in the following table:

Type	Number
Fatal	1
Error	2
Warning	4
Status	8
Info	16
Verbose	32
Debug	64

To calculate the numeric parameter, add up the numbers for the message types you want to include. The default for both -outlevel and -loglevel is 15, which selects fatal, error, warning, and status messages (1+2+4+8).

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