ActsAsTaggableSimple

Overview

ActsAsTaggableSimple provides an acts_as style method to ActiveRecord::Base for taggable records. It also provides the following methods to a taggable model:

tag_list - returns an Array of tag String objects
tag_list= - takes either a String of tags or an array of tag String objects and sets the tags for the object

acts_as_taggable provides two new attributes for a model:

tags - the ActsAsTaggable::Tag objects associated with the taggable item
taggings - the ActsAsTaggable::Tagging join objects associated with the taggable item

Installation

For Rails 3 applications you should add the following line to your Gemfile:

gem 'acts_as_taggable_simple'

Then run:

bundle install

You then need to run the migration generator to generate the necessary migration for acts_as_taggable_simple to work properly.

rails generate acts_as_taggable_simple:migration

Next, run the migration. NOTE: you cannot have a table named tags or taggings, as these names are used by acts_as_taggable_simple.

rake db:migrate

That’s it, you are ready to start using the gem.

Getting Started

This is a walkthrough for setting up and using a taggable model. We will be creating an application for taking notes that we want to tag for easy searching later on.

The first step is to make our ActiveRecord model taggable.

class Note < ActiveRecord::Base
    attr_accessible :content
    acts_as_taggable
end

We can then create a new note in the usual manner.

note = Note.new :content => "acts_as_taggable_simple is so simple!"

We can give the note tags.

note.tag_list = "rails tags gem"

We can also give the note tags by passing an Array of String’s.

note.tag_list = %w{rails tags gem}

We can retrieve an Array of tag String’s for our note.

note.tag_list  # returns ["rails", "tags", "gem"]

Note that our note will not be tagged until we save it.

note.save

Now when we retrieve our note from active record, it will retain the tags we have given it.

If necessary we can directly manipulate a note’s tag objects. This should not be necessary though, and for normal use we can do all of our tag editing through tag_list.

note.tags << ActsAsTaggableSimple::Tag.new :name => 'why_did_we_do_this?'

We can also manipulate the join objects by accessing taggings on a note. Again, there is usually never a need to do this.

note.taggings  # returns all of the ActsAsTaggableSimple::Tagging objects for our note

This is all we can do with this gem. Things like searching are left to the user or solutions like: github.com/ernie/meta_search

If you want to do cloud calculations on tags, this task is left to you.

Example

app/models/taggable_model.rb

class TaggableModel < ActiveRecord::Base
    acts_as_taggable
end

rails console

t = TaggableModel.new :tag_list => "rails css javascript"
t.save
t.tag_list # returns ["rails", "css", "javascript"]
t.tag_list = "rails html js"
t.save
t.tag_list # returns ["rails", "html", "js"]
# note that tag_list is updated immediately after setting
# it, while tags and taggings are only updated after
# saving the model

Credits/Thanks