Clean up tags

[rob-hills]

User defined tags are a wonderful thing, but unfortunately they get messy after a while. Our tag dataset has accumulated annoying little problems like duplicates with different case or different/incorrect spelling, tags with punctuation marks appended etc.

Some of these problem tags can simply be edited away. However, misspelled (or alternate-case) tags can't just be edited without creating duplicates.

I would like to see two changes to Tendenci to improve tags:

1. When a user tags an article, I assume Tendenci checks if that tag exists in the tagging_tags table and if it doesn't exist, add it. I believe that search for an existing tag should be case insensitive . This will prevent different-case duplicates from getting into the database; and
2. Add a facility to Tendenci that enables two tags to be merged. This would involve deleting one tag from the tagging_tags table and updating all tagging_taggeditem records that have the deleted tag's id, replacing them with the merged tag's id (or possibly in the reverse order depending on foreign-key constraints).

[jennyq]

Hi @rob-hills,

Tendenci uses django-tagging to manage the tags. The tag name is a unique field, but it does not check upper or lower cases for duplicates https://github.com/Fantomas42/django-tagging/blob/develop/tagging/models.py#L476. We probably can not change that. What we can do is to add the merge feature, as you described, to enable two or more tags to be merged.

[rob-hills]

Hi @jennyq,

Thanks for your reply. Interestingly, in the tagging models code you linked, line 70 checks for a setting named settings.FORCE_LOWER_CASE. I did some sleuthing and found the documentation about the FORCE_LOWERCASE_TAGS setting.

Of course forcing all tags to lower case isn't exactly the same as having a case-insensitive tag comparison, but it achieves the same goal, reducing tagging mess and confusion caused by case-sensitive tags.

Obviously I'll need to sort out our tag data before switching this setting on. I can do this with some one-off SQL, though the proposed tag merge functionality would be very helpful here. However, I don't imagine this would be a high priority enhancement?

[jennyq]

@rob-hills, Good found on the doc about the setting FORCE_LOWERCASE_TAGS. For the tag merge functionality, we'll consider it after the next major version release.