Tags

The tags field takes a comma-delimited list of one or more tags. For example:

Neatline's tagging system provides a powerful and flexible way to slice and dice records into groups of related subsets. This can be useful for a number of reasons:

Tag requirements

In order for the tags to work correctly, there are a couple important requirements:

  1. Tags can contain letters, numbers, and underscores (_), but no spaces or hyphens (-). Technically, it's actually possible to use spaces and hyphens in tags, but it's strongly discouraged, because it effectively results in multiple taggings. For example, if you had a tag called democrat-2012, Neatline would consider the record to be tagged with democrat, 2012, and democrat-2012. So, if you were to start using a more generalized tag called just democrat, queries for democrat would match the record, even though it's tagged with the more specific democrat-2013. This is confusing, but, unfortunately, the issue lies at the level of the fulltext searching system in the underlying MySQL database that we use to implement the feature. We're working on a fix for this - for now, if you need "spaces" in the tags, just use underscores (eg, democrat_2012).

  2. Tags must be at least 4 characters in length. Again, this is actually a requirement that's built in to the fulltext searching system in MySQL. Really, though, this is a healthy constraint - tag names should be semantic and descriptive, so most tags should be longer than three letters anyway.

  3. Tags must be separated by commas, or else Neatline won't know where one tag stops and another starts.