Tagify - tags input component

Transforms an input field or a textarea into a Tags component, in an easy, customizable way, with great performance and small code footprint, exploded with features.
Vanilla ⚡ React ⚡ Vue ⚡ Angular

👉 See Demos 👈

Table of Contents

• Installation
• Selling points
• What can Tagify do
• Building the project
• Adding tags dynamically
• Ajax whitelist
• Edit tags
• DOM Templates
• Suggestions selectbox
• React wrapper
• Angular wrapper
• Vue Example
• jQuery version
• FAQ
• Methods
• Events
• Settings

Installation

npm i @yaireo/tagify --save

Usage (in your bundle):

import Tagify from '@yaireo/tagify'

var tagify = new Tagify(...)

Don't forget to include tagify.css file in your project. CSS location: @yaireo/tagify/dist/tagify.css SCSS location: @yaireo/tagify/src/tagify.scss See SCSS usecase & example

Features

• Can be applied on input & textarea elements
• Supports mix content (text and tags together)
• Supports single-value mode (like <select>)
• Supports whitelist/blacklist
• Supports Templates for: component wrapper, tag items, suggestion list & suggestion items
• Shows suggestions selectbox (flexiable settings & styling) at full (component) width or next to the typed texted (caret)
• Allows setting suggestions' aliases for easier fuzzy-searching
• Auto-suggest input as-you-type with ability to auto-complete
• Can paste in multiple values: tag 1, tag 2, tag 3 or even newline-separated tags
• Tags can be created by Regex delimiter or by pressing the "Enter" key / focusing of the input
• Validate tags by Regex pattern
• Tags are editable
• ARIA accessibility support
• Supports read-only mode to the whole componenet or per-tag
• Each tag can have any properties desired (class, data-whatever, readonly...)
• Automatically disallow duplicate tags (vis "settings" object)
• Has built-in CSS loader, if needed (Ex. AJAX whitelist pulling)
• Tags can be trimmed via hellip by giving max-width to the tag element in your CSS
• Easily change direction to RTL (via the SCSS file)
• Internet Explorer - A polyfill script can be used: tagify.polyfills.min.js in /dist
• Many useful custom events
• Original input/textarea element values kept in sync with Tagify

Building the project

Simply run gulp in your terminal, from the project's path (Gulp should be installed first).

Source files are this path: /src/

Output files, which are automatically generated using Gulp, are in: /dist/

The rest of the files are most likely irrelevant.

Adding tags dynamically

var tagify = new Tagify(...);

tagify.addTags(["banana", "orange", "apple"])

// or add tags with pre-defined propeties

tagify.addTags([{value:"banana", color:"yellow"}, {value:"apple", color:"red"}, {value:"watermelon", color:"green"}])

Output value

There are two possible ways to get the value of the tags:

1. Access the tagify's instance's value prop: tagify.value (Array of tags)
2. Access the original input's value: inputElm.value (Stringified Array of tags)

Ajax whitelist

Dynamically-loaded suggestions list (whitelist) from the server (as the user types) is a frequent need to many.

Tagify comes with its own loading animation, which is a very lightweight CSS-only code, and the loading state is controlled by the method tagify.loading which accepts true or false as arguments.

Below is a basic example using the fetch API. I advise to abort the last request on any input before starting a new request.

Example:

var input = document.querySelector('input'),
    tagify = new Tagify(input, {whitelist:[]}),
    controller; // for aborting the call

// listen to any keystrokes which modify tagify's input
tagify.on('input', onInput)

function onInput( e ){
  var value = e.detail.value;
  tagify.settings.whitelist.length = 0; // reset the whitelist

  // https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/AbortController/abort
  controller && controller.abort();
  controller = new AbortController();

  // show loading animation and hide the suggestions dropdown
  tagify.loading(true).dropdown.hide.call(tagify)

  fetch('http://get_suggestions.com?value=' + value, {signal:controller.signal})
    .then(RES => RES.json())
    .then(function(whitelist){
      // update inwhitelist Array in-place
      tagify.settings.whitelist.splice(0, whitelist.length, ...whitelist)
      tagify.loading(false).dropdown.show.call(tagify, value); // render the suggestions dropdown
    })
}

Edit tags

Tags which aren't read-only can be edited by double-clicking them (by default) or by changing the editTags setting to 1, making tags editable by single-clicking them.

The value is saved on blur or by pressing enter key. Pressing Escape will revert the change trigger blur. ctrlz will revert the change if an edited tag was marked as not valid (perhaps duplicate or blacklisted)

To prevent all tags from being allowed to be editable, set the editTags setting to false (or null).
To do the same but for specific tag(s), set those tags' data with editable property set to false:

<input value='[{"value":"foo", "editable":false}, {"value":"bar"}]'>

DOM Templates

It's possible to control the templates for the following HTML elements tagify generates by modying the settings.templates Object with your own custom functions which should output a string.

Default templates

templates : {
  wrapper(input, settings){
    return `<tags class="tagify ${settings.mode ? "tagify--" + settings.mode : ""} ${input.className}"
                        ${settings.readonly ? 'readonly aria-readonly="true"' : 'aria-haspopup="listbox" aria-expanded="false"'}
                        role="tagslist"
                        tabIndex="-1">
                <span contenteditable data-placeholder="${settings.placeholder || '&#8203;'}" aria-placeholder="${settings.placeholder || ''}"
                    class="tagify__input"
                    role="textbox"
                    aria-controls="dropdown"
                    aria-autocomplete="both"
                    aria-multiline="${settings.mode=='mix'?true:false}"></span>
            </tags>`
  },

  tag(value, tagData){
      return `<tag title='${tagData.title || value}'
                contenteditable='false'
                spellcheck='false'
                tabIndex="-1"
                class='tagify__tag ${tagData.class ? tagData.class : ""}'
                ${this.getAttributes(tagData)}>
          <x title='' class='tagify__tag__removeBtn' role='button' aria-label='remove tag'></x>
          <div>
              <span class='tagify__tag-text'>${value}</span>
          </div>
      </tag>`
  },

  dropdown(settings){
      var _s = settings.dropdown,
          className = `${_s.position == 'manual' ? "" : `tagify__dropdown tagify__dropdown--${_s.position}`} ${_s.classname}`.trim();

      return `<div class="${className}" role="listbox" aria-labelledby="dropdown">
                  <div class="tagify__dropdown__wrapper"></div>
                  <button class="tagify__dropdown__addNewBtn">add new</button>
              </div>`
  },

  dropdownItem( item ){
    return `<div ${this.getAttributes(item)}
                        class='tagify__dropdown__item ${item.class ? item.class : ""}'
                        tabindex="0"
                        role="option">${item.value}</div>`
  }
}

Suggestions selectbox

The suggestions selectbox is shown is a whitelist Array of Strings or Objects was passed in the settings when the Tagify instance was created. Suggestions list will only be rendered if there are at least two matching sugegstions (case-insensetive).

The selectbox dropdown will be appended to the document's <body> element and will be rendered by default in a position below (bottom of) the Tagify element. Using the keyboard arrows up/down will highlight an option from the list, and hitting the Enter key to select.

It is possible to tweak the selectbox dropdown via 2 settings:

• enabled - this is a numeral value which tells Tagify when to show the suggestions dropdown, when a minimum of N characters were typed.
• maxItems - Limits the number of items the suggestions selectbox will render

var input = document.querySelector('input'),
    tagify = new Tagify(input, {
        whitelist : ['aaa', 'aaab', 'aaabb', 'aaabc', 'aaabd', 'aaabe', 'aaac', 'aaacc'],
        dropdown : {
            classname     : "color-blue",
            enabled       : 0,              // show the dropdown immediately on focus
            maxItems      : 5,
            position      : "text",         // place the dropdown near the typed text
            closeOnSelect : false,          // keep the dropdown open after selecting a suggestion
            highlightFirst: true
        }
    });

🠋 **Will render:** 🠋

<div class="tagify__dropdown tagify__dropdown--text" style="left:993.5px; top:106.375px; width:616px;">
    <div class="tagify__dropdown__wrapper">
      <div class="tagify__dropdown__item tagify__dropdown__item--active" value="aaab">aaab</div>
      <div class="tagify__dropdown__item" value="aaabb">aaabb</div>
      <div class="tagify__dropdown__item" value="aaabc">aaabc</div>
      <div class="tagify__dropdown__item" value="aaabd">aaabd</div>
      <div class="tagify__dropdown__item" value="aaabe">aaabe</div>
    </div>
</div>

By default searching the suggestions is using fuzzy-search (see settings).

If you wish to assign alias to items (in your suggestion list), add the searchBy property to whitelist items you wish to have an alias for. In the below example, when typing a part of string which is included in the searchBy property, the suggested item will match "Israel" will be rendered in the suggestion list selectbox.

Example for a suggestion item alias

whitelist = [
    ...
    { value:'Israel', code:'IL', searchBy:'holy land, desert, middle east' },
    ...
]

Another handy setting is dropdown.searchKeys which, like the above dropdown.searchBy setting, allows expanding the search of any typed terms to more than the value property of the whitelist items (if items are a Collection).

Example whitelist:

[
  {
    value    : "foo",
    nickname : "bar",
    email    : "baz@mail.com"
  },
  ...
]

// setting to search in other keys:

{
  dropdown: {
    searchKeys: ["nickname", "email"] // "value" & "searchBy" key are searched in, regardless
  }
}

Mixed-Content

To use this feature it must be toggled - see settings.

When mixing text with tags, the original textarea (or input) element will have a value as follows:

[[cartman]]⁠ and [[kyle]]⁠ do not know [[Homer simpson]]⁠

If the inital value of the textarea or input is formatted as the above example, tagify will try to automatically convert everything between [[ & ]] to a tag, if tag exists in the whitelist, so make sure when the Tagify instance is initialized, that it has tags with the correct value property that match the same values that appear between [[ & ]].

Applying the setting dropdown.position:"text" is encouraged for mixed-content tags, because the suggestions list will be rendered right next to the caret location and not the the bottom of the Tagify componenet, which might look weird when there is already a lot of content at multiple lines.

If a tag does not exists in the whitelist, it may be created by the user and all you should do is listen to the add event and update your local/remote state.

Single-Value

Similar to native <Select> element, but allows typing free text as value.

React

A Tagify React component is exported as <Tags> from react.tagify.js:

import Tags from "@yaireo/tagify/dist/react.tagify" // React-wrapper file

const App = () => {
  return (
    <Tags
      settings={settings}  // tagify settings object
      value="a,b,c"
      {...tagifyProps}   // dynamic props such as "loading", "showDropdown:'abc'", "value"
      onChange={e => console.log("CHANGED:", e)}
    />
  )
})

Check the live demo for a React integration example.

Angular

TagifyComponent which will be used by your template as <tagify>

Example:

<div>
  testing tagify wrapper
  <tagify [settings]="settings"
          (add)="onAdd($event)"
          (remove)="onRemove($event)">
  </tagify>
  <button (click)="clearTags()">clear</button>
  <button (click)="addTags()">add Tags</button>
</div>

TagifyService

(The tagifyService is a singletone injected by angular, do not create a new instance of it) Remember to add TagifyService to your module definition.

Example:

import {Component, OnDestroy} from '@angular/core';
import {TagifyService} from '@yaireo/tagify';

@Component({
  selector: 'app-root',
  templateUrl: './app.component.html',
  styleUrls: ['./app.component.css']
})
export class AppComponent implements OnDestroy {

  constructor(private tagifyService: TagifyService) {}
  public settings = { blacklist: ['fucking', 'shit']};

  onAdd(tagify) {
    console.log('added a tag', tagify);
  }

  onRemove(tags) {
    console.log('removed a tag', tags);
  }
  clearTags() {
    this.tagifyService.removeAll();
  }
  addTags() {
    this.tagifyService.addTags(['this', 'is', 'cool']);
  }
  ngOnDestroy() {
    this.tagifyService.destroy();
  }
}

jQuery version

jQuery.tagify.js

A jQuery wrapper verison is also available, but I advise not using it because it's basically the exact same as the "normal" script (non-jqueryfied) and all the jQuery's wrapper does is allowing to chain the event listeners for ('add', 'remove', 'invalid')

$('[name=tags]')
    .tagify()
    .on('add', function(e, tagName){
        console.log('added', tagName)
    });

Accessing methods can be done via the .data('tagify'):

$('[name=tags]').tagify();
// get tags from the server (ajax) and add them:
$('[name=tags]').data('tagify').addTags('aaa, bbb, ccc')

FAQ

To render all tags at the same line, without tags wrapping to new lines, add this to your .tagify CSS Rule:

flex-wrap: nowrap;

• Double-click tag fires both "edit" & "click" custom events
• Manualy open the suggestions dropdown
• Render your own suggestions dropdown
• Allow max length on mix mode
• Always show dropdown
• Limit the length of a tag value (minimum & maximum)
• Mixed mode initial value
• Random colors for each tag
• Format input value for server side
• Writing to tagify textarea
• Scroll all tags within one line, instead of growing vertically
• Insert emoji at caret location when editing a tag
• propagate change event
• Manually update tag data after it was added

CSS Variables (see MDN docs)

These CSS variables allow easy customization without the need to manually write CSS. If you do wish to heavily style your Tagify components, then you can use these variables within your modified styles.

For example how this can be used, see the demos page.

Name	Info
--tags-border-color	The outer border color which surrounds tagify
--tag-bg	Tag background color
--tag-hover	Tag background color on hover (mouse)
--tag-text-color	Tag text color
--tag-text-color--edit	Tag text color when a Tag is being edited
--tag-pad	Tag padding, from all sides. Ex. .3em .5em
--tag--min-width	Minimum Tag width
--tag--max-width	Maximum tag width, which gets trimmed with hellip after
--tag-inset-shadow-size	This is the inner shadow size, which dictates the color of the Tags. It's important the size fits exactly to the tag. Change this if you change the --tag-pad or fontsize.
--tag-invalid-color	For border color of edited tags with invalid value being typed into them
--tag-invalid-bg	Background color for invalid Tags.
--tag-remove-bg	Tag background color when hovering the × button.
--tag-remove-btn-bg	The remove (×) button background color
--tag-remove-btn-bg--hover	The remove (×) button background color on hover
--loader-size	Loading animation size. 1em is pretty big, default is a bit less.
--tag-hide-transition	Controls the transition property when a tag is removed. default is '.3s'
--placeholder-colo	Placeholder text color

Methods

Name	Parameters	Info
destroy		Reverts the input element back as it was before Tagify was applied
removeAllTags		Removes all tags and resets the original input tag's value property
addTags	tagsItems, clearInput, skipInvalid	Accepts a String (word, single or multiple with a delimiter), an Array of Objects (see above) or Strings
removeTag	Node/String	Removes a specific tag. Argument is the tag DOM element to be removed, or value. When nothing passed, removes last tag (see source code)
loadOriginalValues	String/Array	Converts the input's value into tags. This method gets called automatically when instansiating Tagify. Also works for mixed-tags
getTagIndexByValue	String	Returns the index of a specific tag, by value
parseMixTags	String	Converts a String argument ([[foo]]⁠ and [[bar]]⁠ are..) into HTML with mixed tags & texts
getTagElms		Returns a DOM nodes list of all the tags
getTagElmByValue	String	Returns a specific tag DOM node by value
editTag	Node	Goes to edit-mode in a specific tag
replaceTag	tagElm, tagData	Exit a tag's edit-mode. if "tagData" exists, replace the tag element with new data and update Tagify value
loading	Boolean	Toogle loading state on/off (Ex. AJAX whitelist pulling)

Events

All triggered events return the instance's scope (tagify).
See e.detail for custom event additional data.

See Examples

var tagify = new Tagify(...)

// events are chainable and multiple events may be binded for the same callback
tagify
  .on('input', e => console.log(e.detail))
  .on('edit:input edit:updated edit:start edit:keydown', e => console.log(e.type, e.detail))

Name	Info
add	A tag has been added
remove	A tag has been removed (use removeTag intead with jQuery)
invalid	A tag has been added but did not pass vaildation. See event detail
input	Input event, when a tag is being typed/edited. e.detail exposes value, inputElm & isValid
click	Clicking a tag. Exposes the tag element, its index & data
keydown	When tagify input has focus and a key was pressed
focus	The component currently has focus
blur	The component lost focus
edit:input	Typing inside an edited tag
edit:beforeUpdate	Just before a tag has been updated, while still in "edit" mode
edit:updated	A tag as been updated (changed view editing or by directly calling the replaceTag() method)
edit:start	A tag is now in "edit mode"
edit:keydown	keydown event while an edited tag is in focus
dropdown:show	Suggestions dropdown is to be rendered. The dropdown DOM node is passed in the callback, see demo.
dropdown:hide	Suggestions dropdown has been removed from the DOM
dropdown:select	Suggestions dropdown item selected (by mouse/keyboard/touch)
dropdown:scroll	Tells the percentage scrolled. (event.detail.percentage)

Settings

Name	Type	Default	Info
placeholder	String		Placeholder text. If this attribute is set on an input/textarea element it will override this setting
delimiters	String	,	[RegEx string] split tags by any of these delimiters. Example: `",
pattern	String/RegEx	null	Validate input by RegEx pattern (can also be applied on the input itself as an attribute) Ex: /[1-9]/
mode	String	null	Use select for single-value dropdown-like select box. See mix as value to allow mixed-content. The 'pattern' setting must be set to some character.
mixTagsInterpolator	Array	['[[', ']]']	Interpolation for mix mode. Everything between these will become a tag
mixTagsAllowedAfter	RegEx	`/,	.
duplicates	Boolean	false	Should duplicate tags be allowed or not
enforceWhitelist	Boolean	false	Should ONLY use tags allowed in whitelist. In mix-mode, setting it to false will not allow creating new tags.
autoComplete.enabled	Boolean	true	Tries to suggest the input's value while typing (match from whitelist) by adding the rest of term as grayed-out text
autoComplete.rightKey	Boolean	false	If true, when → is pressed, use the suggested value to create a tag, else just auto-completes the input. In mixed-mode this is ignored and treated as "true"
whitelist	Array	[]	An array of tags which only they are allowed
blacklist	Array	[]	An array of tags which aren't allowed
addTagOnBlur	Boolean	true	Automatically adds the text which was inputed as a tag when blur event happens
callbacks	Object	{}	Exposed callbacks object to be triggered on events: 'add' / 'remove' tags
maxTags	Number	Infinity	Maximum number of allowed tags. when reached, adds a class "tagify--hasMaxTags" to <Tags>
editTags	Number	2	Number of clicks on a tag to enter "edit" mode. Only 1 or 2 work. false or null will disallow editing
templates	Object	wrapper, tag, dropdownItem	Object consisting of functions which return template strings
transformTag	Function	undefined	Takes a tag input as argument and returns a transformed value
keepInvalidTags	Boolean	false	If true, do not remove tags which did not pass validation
skipInvalid	Boolean	false	If true, do not add invalid, temporary, tags before automatically removing them
backspace	*	true	On pressing backspace key: true - remove last tag edit - edit last tag
dropdown.enabled	Number	2	Minimum characters input for showing a suggestions list. false will not render a suggestions list.
dropdown.maxItems	Number	10	Maximum items to show in the suggestions list
dropdown.classname	String	""	Custom classname for the dropdown suggestions selectbox
dropdown.fuzzySearch	Boolean	true	Enables filtering dropdown items values' by string containing and not only beginning
dropdown.position	String	null	manual - will not render the dropdown, and you would need to do it yourself. See demo text - will place the dropdown next to the caret all - normal, full-width design
dropdown.highlightFirst	Boolean	false	When a suggestions list is shown, highlight the first item, and also suggest it in the input (The suggestion can be accepted with → key)
dropdown.closeOnSelect	Boolean	true	close the dropdown after selecting an item, if enabled:0 is set (which means always show dropdown on focus)
dropdown.mapValueTo	Function/String		if whitelist is an Array of Objects: Ex. [{value:'foo', email:'foo@a.com'},...]) this setting controlls which data key will be printed in the dropdown. Ex. mapValueTo: data => "To:" + data.email Ex. mapValueTo: "email"
dropdown.searchKeys	Array	["value", "searchBy"]	When a user types something and trying to match the whitelist items for suggestions, this setting allows matching other keys of a whitelist objects