Entry Tagging

[megahirt]

I have observed that users would like the ability to tag entries in a general sense for later processing. This is similar to the "star" in Gmail. The user wants to be able to "star" or "tag" an entry to remember it, and then be able to filter based upon that tag or star. @rmunn suggested we provide a set of color tags or stars, not just one star.

@alex suggested that we consider how these tags could be easily transferred back into FLEx, and we decided that a custom field option list was the best way to do that.

[alex-larkin]

Great summary of our conversation! I will just add that if there is ever any kind of entry data that is not synced with FLEx, that that limitation should be communicated with the user the first time(s) that he creates said data.

I would like to encourage the development team to always ensure all data is syncable. (Though a short-term no-sync limitation during the development of a feature would be acceptable).

[rmunn]

Here's what I wrote in #1153, which I created when I hadn't noticed that this card exists:

One user wanted the ability to mark certain entries, and then have a filter that would show only the marked entries. Something like the "star" feature in Gmail. Then a filter could be used to see only the starred entries, or only the unstarred ones.

This would involve a new boolean property on entries in MongoDB, or perhaps we could plan ahead and make it a string so that we could have multiple label colors à la Trello (red, blue, green...). There would also be UI to mark or unmark ("star" or "unstar") the entry on the entry view page, and the star would show up in the entry list view on the left.

The star status would not be sent in a Send/Receive operation; this would be in Language Forge only and would not show up in FieldWorks. (Unless user feedback suggests that they want to see the star status in FieldWorks as well, in which case we'd track that work in a separate issue).

Alternatives:

• Comments could be used right now to implement this: we have a status on comments called "To Do", along with "Resolved" and "Unresolved". But that's at a field level, not an entry level, and there's no entry-list filter for "All entries with a "To Do" comment".
• A custom field called "Status" could also be used to implement this idea, but that's also not as easy to filter for in our current entry-list implementation.

[rmunn]

Also, Alex Larkin said:

If this is implemented without FLEx support, please notify the user when he starts using the feature that stars won't be visible in FLEx.

I imagine a common reason for starring entries would be to prepare them for publication, which would generally be done via an export from FLEx. Workaround: without FLEx compatibility, I guess that the user could also manually mark the publication field, or a field custom to his project. Ensuring 100% alignment between stars and a second field would likely be difficult, though.

What are other use cases for starring?

I'm copying that comment over here as well so the whole conversation is visible here.