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LTAGS

Tagging system for Laravel.

FEATURES

• arbitrary models: tags can be attached to any Eloquent Model.
• nested tags: a tag can also be tagged, allowing hierarchical structures.
• context aware: multiple tags with the same label can be created for different contexts.
• non intrusive: a resource can be tagged without any modification to its classes or DB tables.
• handy API: handy API to add/set/get/delete tags to a model, and to fetch models by their tags.

INSTALL

Install using composer:

Publish the ACL table migrations:

Run the migrations:

USAGE

This sections explains how to use the package. A demo app is also available on uwla/ltags-demo to illustrate use case.

Tags

Create tag:

Get tag:

Delete tag or tags by name:

To update a tag or tags, use Eloquent's update method, as provided by Laravel's documentation. This package provides alternative ways to create, fetch and delete tags via their names just to make it more convenient and less verbose, but when it comes to updating tags Laravel's interface is straightforward and we cannot make it less verbose.

Tagged Models

Any model can be tagged. The only thing needed is to add the Taggable trait:

We are going to use a Post model as an example of an application for user's posts, but it could be any model to be tagged including the user itself!

To add a tag or tags to a model:

To get a model's tags:

To check if a model has a tag or tags:

To remove a tag or tags from a model:

To set the tags of a model:

To get the models along with their tags or with the name (only) of the tags:

In the second line of each example, only the name of the tag is attached to the model, not the tag itself (which is an instance of Tag).

In the example above, each model will have a new attribute called tags, which is a Collection of the model's directed tags (that is, nested tags are not included). You can then apply other operations on top of the tags by using Laravel's Collection handy methods, such as map, pluck, filter, etc.

To get the models tagged by a tag, or tags:

In the example above, taggedBy will give you all models that are tagged by at least one of the provided tags. If you want the models to be tagged by all the tags, then use taggedByAll static method, which has the exact same syntax as taggedBy (in other words, the expected parameters are the same).

Notice: The taggedByAll needs to check if all are matched, while taggedBy only needs to check one; thus, the taggedByAll may be come slow if you are using a relational database and are trying to fetch models tagged by many tags with a high depth value. A graph database is more suitable in this case. But for most applications this won't be a problem even if the depth is, let's say, equal to five or six.

Namespaces

There can be multiple tags with different namespaces (aka, contexts).

For example, the developer may want a "top" tag for posts and a "top" tag for videos (although I personally think it is good enough to have just one "top" tag for both posts and video as long as the developers take proper care).

Another example, there could be a tag "free" for the context of payments and a tag "free" in the context of Free Software, in which it means "freedom".

Ultimately, it is up to the developers to decide if namespaces are needed, since they are the ones who know the application requirements.

Let's see how to use them. To create, find or delete a tag for a particular namespace:

When the getTags and hasTags methods are called, they will use the namespace obtained by calling getTagNamespace, which by default is null. You could use a static namespace for a given model or a dynamic one.

Here is an example of a static (aka, does not change) tag namespace:

Now, an example of a dynamic one:

Which you can then change in real time:

The namespace will only affect the methods to which were passed string names as arguments because the tags associated with those names needed to be fetched behind the scenes. If a Eloquent model or a Eloquent collection is passed as a argument, the namespace will have no effect because the Eloquent models already have the tag ids which uniquely identify the tags.

Custom Tag Model

You can use your custom variant for the Tag model instead of the default one, which is Uwla\Ltags\Models\Tag.

In order for the Taggable trait to use your tag instead of the default one, you can override its method getTagClass as follow:

Instead of doing that for every model, you could have your custom Taggable trait as well:

Then, use App\Traits\Taggable instead of Uwla\Ltags\Traits\Taggable.

EXAMPLES

Besides using tags to organize and search content such as videos or articles, there are several ways in which tags can be quite handy. Let's explore them.

Suppose you have an applications with posts, some of them public. In your Laravel PostPolicy, you could do the following to check if a user is allowed to view a particular post:

In the example above, we avoid having to add a is_public column to the posts table.

Another example is using tags to tag users based on their roles. Some applications just add a role column to the users table, then they would check user->role. But this creates an additional column. If you don't need a sophisticated Access Control System, but need only a simple way to categorize users based on roles, you could simply add tags to the user.

Other example is an application that promotes programming contests, which may have their visibility as public or private, their status as running or expired, and so on. Instead of adding several columns in the contests table, the developers may choose to use tags as an additional source of information about the contests. Of course, whether it is a good decision or not is up to the developers to figure out for their particular case.

These are just three simple examples. The possibilities are limited only by the developer's imagination. Tags can be adapted to any context which has resources that can be grouped by some criteria, any context which deals with clusters.

CONTRIBUTIONS

Contributions are welcome. Fork the repository, make your changes, then make a pull request. Check development for all development-related instructions.

HELP

Open an issue on this package repository on GitHub. I will be glad to help.

LICENSE

MIT.