Searching ColdFusion 8 documentation

The documentation that ships with ColdFusion 8 does not include the functionality to search — unlike ColdFusion documentation in the earlier versions which included a search.

I find that I use the documentation search quite a lot. Livedocs provides the ability to search CF 8 documentation. However, I do not necessarily want to go to the web each time I want to search.

A much nicer way to search ColdFusion 8 documentation is by using Eclipse. Here’s how…

Download CF 8 documentation for Eclipse. And then copy the JAR file into the “plugins” directory of Eclipse. Restart your Eclipse.

Go to Help > Help Contents. You should see “ColdFusion 8 Documentation” appearing in the Contents pane on the left. (If you don’t then something is wrong and you need to sort this out first.)

In the Search box on the top of the Contents pane, type in a keyword, e.g., “cfinterface”. Eclipse indexes the newly added CF Docs and shows the results.

Gotta love Eclipse.

BTW, if you use Flex Builder, you should be able to follow the same process to make CF 8 docs searchable.

3 thoughts on “Searching ColdFusion 8 documentation”

  1. Thanks Jake… The issue that I was facing was to search the documentation on my dev box. If you want to search it online, you can also use the actual CF 8 docs: http://livedocs.adobe.com/coldfusion/8/.

    In fact what prompted me to find a way around online searching was that I was going to be travelling, and was not going to be online, but at the same time wanted the docs to be searchable on my local machine.

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