Tagging

The search capabilities discussed above give users the ability to find a group of records in an ad hoc fashion, but there is no permanence to the results. Tagging gives users the opportunity to identify records in an ad hoc fashion by associating tag values with individual records. You use these tags to find groups of records with one or more tags.

Tagging is a familiar process on Web 2.0 sites. A tag adds another value to the metadata for a record that can be used to retrieve records with the same value.

Tagging functionality is built into the Force Platform, but is not enabled by default. As with search, you add tags to your application through the Customize menu.

1.	Click Setup Customize Tags Tag Settings and select the Enable Public Tags checkbox to display the page shown in the figure below. As you can see, there are two types of tags available: personal tags, which are only visible and useable by an individual user, and public tags, which are available to all users. Both tagging options work in the same way, but both sets of tags are separate; you cannot search on personal and public tags at the same time. You now have the option of adding tag sections to notes, documents, reports, and individual page layouts. If you enable personal tags, you have the same option for those tags. Figure 85. Tag Settings [View full size image]
2.	Click Enable Public Tags and make sure all of your custom object layouts are in the Selected Page Layouts list on the right. Click Save.
3.	Go to the Home Page Layout page and check to make sure that Tags are included in the narrow section of the Home page.
4.	Go to the User Interface menu under Customize and select Show Custom Sidebar Components on All Pages, as the Tags component is considered a custom component. If you did not select this option, the interface to tag searching only appears in the Sidebar of the Home Page. Click Save.
5.	Click the Candidate tab and select a candidate. The Add Tags link displays in the upper right. Click the link to bring up the tag interface, as shown in the figure below. You can add one or more personal or private tags through this interface, separated by commas. Note The initialization process for this chapter described how to get these tags attached to your existing records. One of the potential problems from ad hoc labeling, such as tags, is the use of similar tags to denote the same quality. This can lead to incorrect data or reduced relevance of results, a common data problem discussed in Chapter 2: Starting Your Force Platform Application. Although the Force Platform implementation of tags cannot eliminate this possibility, both public and private tags use an autocomplete function, which gives suggestions for the use of existing tags as soon as the user enters a letter for the tag. For this example, the records loaded into the Candidate object already have tags associated with them. Users have created tags to indicate whether a candidate is recommended, the office closest to a candidate, and whether a candidate is available for remote work. You can use multiple tags to find those candidates that fit multiple criteria by using the Tags interface. Figure 86. Tag interface [View full size image]
6.	Go to the Home tab to see the Tags link and the Recent Tags list button. Click the Tags link to bring up the page shown, in completed form, in the figure below. With the Tags page, users locate specific tags alphabetically or enter tags directly into the search box. In the alphabetical listing, select a tag to be used as a filter by clicking the tag. Figure 87. Tags page [View full size image]
7.	Click on the HQ tags.
8.	Add in the recommend tag.
9.	Add in the remote tag. Notice two things in this three step process: a tag can be associated with more than one object, and that the filtering effect of adding more tags is cumulative. When you added the remote tag to the filter set, you limited the number of records selected.
10.	Delete the HQ tag from the filter by clicking on the red X next to the tag.

Since the records returned from a tag search include a link to the specific records that satisfy the tag filters, tags give your users the ability to combine records into many different groups, and to use those groups to identify specific records for investigation.

Giving users ad hoc capabilities helps them to add some additional data to any object without having to modify the fields in that object. Tags provide almost unlimited flexibility in identifying and filtering records.

But for standard business functions, you need to provide something more than an ad hoc approach. The remainder of this chapter discusses the reporting and analytic capabilities of the Force Platform.