yii2-taggable

Manage tags of ActiveRecords in PHP-framework YII 2.0

This package contains five classes to handle the tagging of ActiveRecords with keywords or similar. The tags can be associated with or decoupled from a model (ActiveRecord), and can be sorted. Tags are manipulated with the excellent jQuery tagEditor developed by Pixabay.

The four main classes of yii2-taggable are:

• TagBehavior - makes an ActiveRecord behave like a tag;
• TaggableBehavior - adds the handling of tags to an ActiveRecord;
• TagEditor - widget to manipulate tags;
• TagSuggestAction - feeds the autocomplete function of TagEditor with data.

There is also a class TagEditorAsset, which is a helper class for TagEditor.

A demonstration of the yii2-taggable suit is here.

Installation

The preferred way to install yii2-taggable is through Composer. Either add the following to the require section of your composer.json file:

"sjaakp/yii2-taggable": "*"

Or run:

$ php composer.phar require sjaakp/yii2-taggable "*"

You can manually install yii2-taggable by downloading the source in ZIP-format.

Setup

Suppose we have a class (ActiveRecord) Article of articles which can be tagged, and another class Tag to hold the tags.

Tag has at least the following attributes:

• id: primary key;
• name: to hold the actual tag keyword;
• count: to hold the number of Article's associated with this tag.

Junction table

Article and Tag are linked with a junction table in a many-to-many relation. Let's call the table article_tag. It has the following fields:

• model_id: holds the primary key of an Article;
• tag_id: holds the primary key of a Tag;
• ord: holds the sorting order of a Tag.

(do not set a primay key with equal name to primary key of Tag table.)

TaggableBehavior

The class Article should be set up like this:

<?php

namespace app\models;

use sjaakp\taggable\TaggableBehavior;

class Article extends ActiveRecord    {

public function rules()
{
	return [
		// ...
		[['editorTags'], 'safe'],
	];
}

	public function behaviors()
	{
        return [
            'taggable' => [
                'class' => TaggableBehavior::className(),
                'tagClass' => Tag::className(),
                'junctionTable' => 'article_tag',
            ]
        ];
    }
	// ...
}

TagBehavior

Class Tag looks something like this:

<?php

namespace app\models;

use sjaakp\taggable\TagBehavior;

class Tag extends ActiveRecord    {

	public function behaviors()
	{
        return [
            'tag' => [
                'class' => TagBehavior::className(),
                'junctionTable' => 'article_tag',
            ]
        ];
    }

    public function getArticles() {
        return $this->hasMany(Article::className(), [ 'id' => 'model_id' ])
            ->viaTable('article_tag', [ 'tag_id' => 'id' ]);
    }

	// ...
}

We've also defined a class method getArticles() to retrieve a query for the associated Articles. Refer to the YII2 documentation.

Article view

In the Article view we can now display the tags like so:

<?php
	// ...
/**
 * @var yii\web\View $this
 * @var ap\models\Article $model
 */
?>
<div class="article-view">

	<!-- Display article title and body here. -->
	
	<h4>Tags</h4>
	<p><?= $model->tagLinks ?></p>
</div>

tagLinks is a new virtual attribute, added to Article by TaggableBehavior.

Article update

To make creating and updating Tags possible, we also have to set up TagController:

<?php

namespace app\controllers;

use yii\web\Controller;
use app\models\Tag;
use sjaakp\taggable\TagSuggestAction;

class TagController extends Controller	{

    public function actions()    {
        return [
            'suggest' => [
                'class' => TagSuggestAction::className(),
                'tagClass' => Tag::className(),
            ],
        ];
    }

	// ...
}

TagEditor

In the Article's update and create views we can now use the TagEditor widget. Add something like this to views\article\_form.php:

<?php

use yii\helpers\Url;
use sjaakp\taggable\TagEditor;

/**
 * @var yii\web\View $this
 * @var app\models\Article $model
 * @var yii\widgets\ActiveForm $form
 */
?>
	...

    <?= $form->field($model, 'editorTags')->widget(TagEditor::className(), [
        'tagEditorOptions' => [
            'autocomplete' => [
                'source' => Url::toRoute(['tag/suggest'])
            ],
        ]
    ]) ?>
	...

editorTags is also a new virtual attribute of Article, added to it by TaggableBehavior. 'tag/suggest' is the base of the route to the suggest action in TagController, which we defined before. Learn more about the tagEditorOptions from Pixabay.

Modifications

The basic setup of yii2-taggable can be modified in a number of ways. Refer to the source files to see which other options are available. Some are:

• $nameAttribute: name attribute of the tag class. Defined in TagBehavior, TaggableBehavior, and TagSuggestAction. Default: 'name'.
• $countAttribute: count attribute of the tag class. Holds the number of associated models. Defined in TaggableBehavior. Default: 'count'.
• $tagKeyAttribute and $modelKeyAttribute: foreign key fields in the junction table. Defined in TagBehavior and TaggableBehavior. Defaults: 'tag_id' and 'model_id' respectively.