= acts_as_taggable_on_steroids

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Email address: [email protected]

== Instructions

This plugin is based on acts_as_taggable by DHH but includes extras such as tests, smarter tag assignment, and tag cloud calculations.

Thanks to www.fanacious.com for allowing this plugin to be released. Please check out their site to show your support.

== Resources

Install

• script/plugin install http://svn.viney.net.nz/things/rails/plugins/acts_as_taggable_on_steroids

== Usage

=== Prepare database

Generate and apply the migration:

ruby script/generate acts_as_taggable_migration rake db:migrate

=== Basic tagging

Using the examples from the tests, let's suppose we have users that have many posts and we want those posts to be able to be tagged by the user.

As usual, we add +acts_as_taggable+ to the Post class:

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base acts_as_taggable

belongs_to :user

end

We can now use the tagging methods provided by acts_as_taggable, tag_list and tag_list=. Both these methods work like regular attribute accessors.

p = Post.find(:first) p.tag_list.to_s # "" p.tag_list = "Funny, Silly" p.save p.reload.tag_list.to_s # "Funny, Silly"

You can also add or remove arrays of tags.

p.tag_list.add("Great", "Awful") p.tag_list.remove("Funny")

=== Finding tagged objects

To retrieve objects tagged with a certain tag, use find_tagged_with.

Post.find_tagged_with('Funny, Silly')

By default, find_tagged_with will find objects that have any of the given tags. To find only objects that are tagged with all the given tags, use match_all.

Post.find_tagged_with('Funny, Silly', :match_all => true)

=== Tag cloud calculations

To construct tag clouds, the frequency of each tag needs to be calculated. Because we specified +acts_as_taggable+ on the Post class, we can get a calculation of all the tag counts by using Post.tag_counts. But what if we wanted a tag count for an single user's posts? To achieve this we call tag_counts on the association:

User.find(:first).posts.tag_counts

=== Caching

It is useful to cache the list of tags to reduce the number of queries executed. To do this, add a column named cached_tag_list to the model which is being tagged.

class CachePostTagList < ActiveRecord::Migration def self.up

You should make sure that the column is long enough to hold

  # the full tag list. In some situations the :text type may be more appropriate.
  add_column :posts, :cached_tag_list, :string
end

end

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base acts_as_taggable

# The caching column defaults to cached_tag_list, but can be changed:
# 
# set_cached_tag_list_column_name "my_caching_column_name"

end

The details of the caching are handled for you. Just continue to use the tag_list accessor as you normally would. Note that the cached tag list will not be updated if you directly create Tagging objects or manually append to the tags or taggings associations. To update the cached tag list you should call save_cached_tag_list manually.

=== Delimiter

If you want to change the delimiter used to parse and present tags, set TagList.delimiter. For example, to use spaces instead of commas, add the following to config/environment.rb:

TagList.delimiter = " "

=== Other

Problems, comments, and suggestions all welcome. [email protected]

== Credits

www.fanacious.com