idea deployment.de

While implementing the function to “connect to friends” in our social network eventize.de, I thought about improving the handling of tags a bit.

The idea was to be able to select tags that were already in use (because it’s likely to use them over and over again). So I build a small jQuery plugin that does exactly this job:

What you basically need is a text field. I post my Rails code here:

<%= text_field_tag :tag_list, value,
  :class => 'text_input',
  :id => identifier_field,
  :onfocus => "jQuery.taginput.showTagList('##{identifier_field}', '##{identifier_popup}')",
  :onblur => "jQuery.taginput.hideTagList('##{identifier_field}', '##{identifier_popup}')",
  :oninput => "jQuery.taginput.setAlreadyUsedTags('##{identifier_field}', '##{identifier_popup}')",
  :autocomplete => 'off'
%>

And a bit HTML code to prebuild the popup (This could be done with jQuery, too):

    <% if tags.size == 0 %>
      <%= t(:'view.relations.edit.tags.no_tags_info') %>
        Put some tag suggegstions here...
       <% tags << "friends"%>
    <% end %>

    <% tags.each do |tag| %>
      <%= "onclick=\"jQuery.taginput.addTagToField('##{identifier_field}','#{tag}', '#{identifier_popup}');
         return false;\""%>><%= tag %>
       <% end %>

    <%= t(:'view.relations.edit.tags.separate_by') %>

Alright, go ahead and check it out for yourself. The code is pretty basic and there’s a lot of space for improvement. If you have any suggestions, post a comment!

jquerytaginput-10

Tags: code, jquery, rails

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 24th, 2009 at 4:07 pm and is filed under Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.