Author Topic: Hierachical groups and tags (Read 2266 times)

xavier · May 16, 2008, 10:00:47 pm

Hi,

It seems to be possible to have a parent tag/group at the db level, but haven't seen it on the sandbox. Is the interface still missing or is there a way to activate it ?

(I'm not looking to extend the feature, eg if a contact is taged "child" is shouldn't be fetched when you search on "parent", just a way of organising better the mess of tags and groups

X+

P.S. Not that I won't come with suggestion to be able to add a field that contains only subtags or subgroups...

Donald Lobo · May 16, 2008, 11:22:28 pm

nestable groups are coming in 2.1, some of the stuff that code for change started work on last summer. Some specifications are here:

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/USPIRG+Project
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Nestable+groups

please do read and give us feedback. as we narrow down the list of 2.1 issues, we'll start focussing our efforts and implement USPIRG and Pledgebank (http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/PledgeBank+for+CiviCRM+-+Project+Home). I suspect/hope this will happen in the next few weeks

lobo

xavier · May 18, 2008, 11:43:02 am

Feedback: YES looks great

However, bit concerned about the induced complexity: what if groups are either ACL and mailings, throw some smart groups in the mix, on several levels, use profile to limit them to some sub goups and you end up at best with something that works but only dave and lobo understand, at worst something that has mostly unpredictable results.

I'd suggest to clarify the various combinations+unit tests them all, at least it would help be sure if it's a bug or a strange looking but expected result.

to avoid the matrix becoming too big, I'd suggest to mark as impossible some combination (eg. a child ACL below a parent mailing...)

In short: beware the bloatware

X+

xavier · May 18, 2008, 12:03:01 pm

What about the tags/subtags ?

Let me try to clarify my needs (and they aren't meant to represent more than one specific use case)

I have tags used to further qualify the area of works of ngos. About 10 big categories, 70 sub categories. Got a few other tags for topics of interest for individuals.

On the groups, I have Int. fedreation, European federation, country level, local branches.

I'd like to be able to group these below one big "NGO type", but as I have an handful, no big deal.

However, for the tags, that's becoming a mess, and not being able to group them as forced us to prefix their name with the category, so at least they are sorted in the expected order and not per alpha. Less than ideal, obviously being able to have several levels of tag would be better.

In this case, I don't expect an org tagged with the child to be auto taged with the parent, just to use them as containers.

I don't expect either a multiple parent type, tree structure will do.

Beside being able to group tags on a hierachical fashion, I'd like to:

- be able to limit to what type of contact I can affect to group/tags (eg. tagging a household NGO doesn't quite make sense)

- be able on the profiles to create a field only with a group of tags/groups instead of the whole list.

Are some of these in the dev pipe ? Do you thing some of these could benefit someone else ?

We are tempted hacking the multilevel tag stuff (again, mostly presentation), if we succeed, could it end in the civicore ?

X+

Donald Lobo · May 18, 2008, 01:51:27 pm

tags/subtags are not part of the plan right now. so a code contribution to do this would be great. i suspect tags are much easier than groups, since groups have "subscription" tables attached to it, while a tag table is very similar to the group_contact table (i.e. links a tag and a group). Any contribution to enable hierarchy in tags would be great

You will need to cache the tag hierarchy at each level to avoid multiple lookups in the db (during search etc)

I think the tag and group hierarchical display can share the same code. hopefully we'll find a dojo widget (tree widget maybe?) that does the needful. i'll investigate it later today

With regard to hierarchical groups, i think its a combination of process and technology. Orgs definitely need to get their process together before using hierarchical groups etc. I also think permissioning and hierarchical groups are related. Some attempts at another look at permisisoning is detailed here: http://civicrm.org/node/339. So comments and feedback on that would also be appreciated. yeah, we do plan on having quite a few unit tests with the nestable group stuff

lobo

xavier · December 10, 2008, 12:18:56 am

Implemented, please test on the sandbox.

http://civicrm.org/node/483

petednz · December 10, 2008, 02:09:26 am

Interesting and useful. Had left comments on blog. One wee issue for me is my preference to be able to leave subcategories showing when i open another group up. Current set up auto closes other ones when i expand a new one.

Otherwise all I can say is well done and looks like I will have to rethink how I apply tags since this has opened up new possibilities.

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Author Topic: Hierachical groups and tags (Read 2266 times)

xavier

Hierachical groups and tags

Donald Lobo

Re: Hierachical groups and tags

xavier

Re: Hierachical groups and tags

xavier

Re: Hierachical groups and tags

Donald Lobo

Re: Hierachical groups and tags

xavier

Re: Hierachical groups and tags

petednz

Re: Hierachical groups and tags