I have noticed that when there is a group tag and an ordinary tag with the same name, the following problems occur:
I would expect DEVONthink to give an accurate representation of the existing tags instead of discarding the group tag or combining tags.
What’s the intention of having a group tag and a normal tag having the same name?
I am making a transition from an indexed & folder-based approach to a pure tag-based approach. (I have previously posted about this here and here.)
During the transition, I have items in groups, functioning as group tags, and items tagged with ordinary tags.
There is also a case where I have groups representing status, one of which being called “Reading” - to indicate that something is being read - and an ordinary tag called Reading, used to tag items about the topic of “Reading”.
Redundant tags, regardless if they’re ordinary or group tags, is not recommended. this is also covered in the Help.
Hi, @BLUEFROG . I have actually re-read that (the Restaurant example in the Nested tags section) today, before creating this topic.
But I think that’s not really the point here.
Are you saying that what I reported is expected behaviour?
If an item is untagged, an ordinary tag will take precedence over a group tag when applying tags, e.g., via the Tag bar.
However, if an item was already in a group and inherited the group tag, you can still apply the ordinary tag.
So, I’d say yes it’s behaving as expected.
And again, redundancy is not recommended, especially as it’s trivial to modify one of the tags to make it unique.
It isn’t always a case of redundancy, as in the “Reading” example I gave in my comment earlier. It’s an example, and there will are more situations that don’t represent redundancy.
Also, I interpret the recommendation against redundancy in the sense that later it might cause confusion because there would be multiple tags with the same name in the tag filter and in the autocompletion.
But the fact that the application allows multiple tags with the same name to be created, but then only presents one is very detrimental to the usability.
Two tags may have the same name, but they are not the same. Why does DEVONthink only present one?
I’m sure that under the hood, two tags with the same name are two different records identified by an integer or a UUID as the primary key. The fact that they happen to have the same name value should be irrelevant and not interfere with functionality.
In fact, in the cases where there is indeed redundancy, the fact that DEVONthink is doing this makes it less likely that the user will notice the existence of tags with the same name, and therefore, less likely he/she will take the steps to address it.
If I understand @BLUEFROG correctly, your use case is not part of the intended operation of DT.
So, why not simply change one of your tags to _tag and keep the other as tag? Or ?tag or !tag or -tag… I, doubt that they’ll hurry to accommodate a border case.
My case is nothing special, and in my opinion, if we start getting too specific and talk about renaming my tags, we are disregarding the problem.
An application that allows a user to create records (such as tags) should then also allow the user to see those records wherever they are listed.
DEVONthink allows me to create two or more tags with the same name, but in certain places, it hides all except one.
That can’t be right. Wouldn’t you agree?
If tags with the same name are not supported, then DEVONthink should not allow them to be created. But this isn’t what I’m proposing.
Are you talking about ordinary tags or ordinary and group tags as the “two or more tags with the same name” ?
is very detrimental to the usability.
and not interfere with functionality.
The usability and functionality are not clearly defined. What do you actually expect to happen?
When I wrote this topic, it was about an ordinary + group tags.
Since then, I noticed that it’s also possible to have multiple ordinary tags with the same name, even in the same place in the tag hierarchy.
I would expect the tag filter and the autocompletion to show me all the tags.
The user can act accordingly. It can be a valid repetition of tag names, or it can be a redundancy that should be resolved.
And as I mentioned above, if there is indeed a redundancy, the fact that DEVONthink hides tags makes it more likely to go unnoticed and remain unresolved.
@cgrunenberg: I would consider that a bug.
If a tag has the same immediate parent, it doesn’t make logical sense to allow for this. Thoughts?
It’s not prevented currently but there are situations when this might be useful, e.g. when reorganizing/renaming your tags.
Noted.
Thank you for your comments so far, @BLUEFROG and @cgrunenberg.
However, the conversation branched off / funnelled into this very specific topic (about multiple ordinary tags with the same name being a bug or not), from an observation I made in this comment.
If we “zoom out” and look at the bigger picture again, wouldn’t you agree that if there are multiple tags with the same name, they should all be listed in autocompletion and tag filter?
I also noticed that this happens when I have two or more group tags with the same name, with a peculiarity. Let’s say I have these folders
Books
- Reading
Technology
- Software
- Reading
Group tags are enabled, so there are two “Reading” group tags.
If I select an item in the sidebar that only contains one of the “Reading” group tags (any of the folders above), the Tag Filter will display the “Reading” tag with the correct “stack” icon that indicates that it’s a group tag.
But when I select an item that contains both “Reading” group tags in its children (for example, selecting the database), the Tag Filter displays “Reading” using the ordinary tag icon.
Surely this has to be a bug.
It’s quite a pain point that DEVONthink is merging and hiding tags.
Please, could this be modified so that:
When multiple tags with the same name would be shown, they would be disambiguated by appending their location next to its name.
Using the example above, the tags filter and the autocompletion would show:
Reading (Books > Reading)Reading (Technology > Software > Reading)This is not recommended and is discussed in the Help.
This was also the subject of a fairly recent blog post…
Redundant tags, whether ordinary or group, are not recommended. In fact, there is a large group of people who feel tags should never be nested. We accommodate both views but strongly recommend using unique singular tags in instances where a conflict of application can arise.
I can understand that having ordinary tags with the same name is not recommended, and that the duplication should be solved by creating the tag further up in the hierarchy.
But with group tags, it does not represent redundancy.
Isn’t it a valid usage scenario to have different folders with the same name, and wanting both to be used as group tags?
Even if two groups/folders have the same name, they are unique in that they exist in different directories. Their immediate parent isn’t the same, and so won’t their full path.
Is there something so fundamental to DEVONthink that couldn’t be modified to make it display two distinct group tags that happen to have the same name?
Having to rename folders that exist in different places in a hierarchy to conform to this limitation does not seem right.
Especially when using autocompletion, specifying group tags is a way of specifying in which groups there should be replicants of an item.
But when there are two group tags with the same name and DEVONthink only displays one, the user is clueless as to where the replicant will be saved. It requires going in DEVONthink to find out where it was saved and manually move the replicant to the other group (group tag), if necessary.
This wouldn’t happen if the autocompletion showed both group tags.
Development can choose to chime in if they so desire, but you aren’t just using two groups. You are modifying the behavior of those groups to create ad-hoc tags on demand. Tags have specific behaviors and limitations and should be handled in the same fashion as ordinary tags.
In fact, in your scenario I see no useful point in using group tags when ordinary tags would be sufficient. Even tags applied to a parent group and and inherited.
Actually earlier versions of DEVONthink 3 did this but we received several requests to show them as one. And since then, your request is the first one to do the opposite again.
Hi, @cgrunenberg . That’s interesting to hear.
When looking for items using the tag filter, I do see the point of the current behaviour of representing multiple items as a single tag. The results can be narrowed down by selecting other tags in the filter.
But in the autocompletion, when using group tags, it would be very useful to see the different all the tag groups, even if they have the same name, because they represent different groups.
The current behaviour is that the last tag is the one that gets applied. In my opinion, this is odd behaviour (e.g.: why should the last one be preferable over the others?) and makes makes things difficult, as I described in the last paragraph of this comment.
If all groups tags were shown in autocompletion, the user would have precise control on where to create replicants, rather than having to right click an item and do “Replicate to…”.
