(Archived) Tag Hierarchy

[A Plus Innovations 0]

Hello,

 

I just started using Evernote for keeping track of things.  It is almost exactly what I was looking for.  The only thing I don't like is how tag hierarchy behaves.  It seems logical to me that selecting a tag would show all notes containing that tag or any of its child tags.  I have read a few of the threads about this issue and it looks like no changes have been made.  I couldn't find a place to make a formal feature request, so consider this my feature request with a few ideas on how to implement it.

 

I am a programmer so I know how easy this would be to implement code-wise (I understand they are a large company and I'm sure it's not a piece of cake to make consistent changes across all platforms).  The search functionality is actually already there so it would just be a change in the search produced when a tag is clicked.

 

I made the following tag hierarchy:

 

>Level 1

     >Level 2

          Level 3

 

I added 4 notes:

"Just Level 1"  tagged (Level 1)

"Just Level 2"  tagged (Level 2)

"Just Level 3"  tagged (Level 3)

"All Levels"      tagged (Level 1, Level 2, Level 3)

 

Clicking any of the level tags results in only showing 2 notes -- the one tagged only with that level and the one tagged with all levels.

 

If I click Level 1, then hold Ctrl while clicking Level 2 and Level 3, it will default to showing any notes that are tagged with ALL of those 3 tags (1 note found).  Clicking the little down arrow next to the search bar reveals the search that was performed.  If I click the pull-down menu to the right of "matching" and change it from "All" to "Any", that produces the results I would expect from simply clicking Level 1 (4 notes found).  I would expect clicking Level 2 to show notes that are tagged Level 2 or Level 3.

 

So basically, it would just be a matter of adding child tags, if any, to the search when a tag is clicked and making the default matching setting "Any" instead of "All".  This could be an option, of course.  This would be perfect because you could tag most notes with a single tag that is most specific and be able to see it when any of the broader tags are clicked.  This wouldn't clutter your notes up with a bunch of tags and you could move things around and change hierarchies without making any changes to the notes themselves.  This also wouldn't require any changes to the database structure which would make the change easier and wouldn't affect anyone who doesn't want to turn the option on.

 

Let me know if there are any downsides to this method that I didn't think of.

 

Thanks!

[gazumped 11,665]

There's that famous phrase again "I know how easy this would be to implement..."

 

I'm not suggesting that your idea isn't a valid and necessary enhancement to the features we see now,  and it makes a lot of logical sense to me that this functionality could be useful to a lot of users.

 

But lots of people (not suggesting this includes you!) seem to think that the Evernote team sit around for much of the day thinking "I wish we had something to upgrade - it's hours 'till lunch..."

 

Being a commercial operation,  most folks in Evernote have a full-time day job,  and have planned their activity for the next 6-12 months around developments that have been debated,  piloted,  tested and generally trialled to death in the past year.  They already have a full dance card.  So no matter how 'easy' the job may be,  it's going to have to go through the usual development process and take weeks,  months or years to get out on the street.

 

And that's if they think it's worth spending time on,  because no matter how relevant truly insightful users (that's you and me) think the feature may be,  there's another 49,999,998 people out there who possible don't care.  they'd rather have more Facebook integration and Background Music.  (Excuse me while I go wash my keyboard)

 

So.  +1 for the idea - just don't hold your breath!

 

(Although just to be supremely mean,  Evernote might have thought about this last year,  and the very next release might be just what you've asked for...)

[Wern 246]

Hi and welcome to the forums !

 

This topic has been discussed here many times. Please use the search function.

EN "Tag hierarchy" is not truly hierarchical. It is only informational in the sense that you can organize your tags in a hierarchy for better visibility / organizing. But each tag will only give you notes tagged before with that tag. You can, however, give a note several tags.

WErn

[jefito 5,589]

The tag tree has always been for organizational purposes (since you can have up to 10000 tags), and not for exposing any sort of semantic hierarchy of tags. This idea has been discussed a fair amount over the year since Evernote implemented the trees, but Evernote has not yet given us any reason to believe that making the tag tree anything other than organizational will ever happen. They typically don't disclose their feature roadmaps anyways.

One option: encode tag semantics in your tag names; see , e.g. http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/23514-organizing-tags-subtags-parent-tags-and-child-tags/. This has some nice advantages, but it's kinda kludgey in some respects.

 

My own thought was to leave tags operating as they do currently, but modify the tag: search term to be able to take into account subitems in the tag hierarchy. See, e.g. http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/15173-shouldnt-selecting-a-parent-tag-search-child-tags/?p=74067. I'd prefer that solution, as it can be used in saved searches; whether any kind of Ctrl+Click or Shift+click mechanism was used to activate them is not of much interest to me.

[jefito 5,589]

If I click Level 1, then hold Ctrl while clicking Level 2 and Level 3, it will default to showing any notes that are tagged with ALL of those 3 tags (1 note found).  Clicking the little down arrow next to the search bar reveals the search that was performed.  If I click the pull-down menu to the right of "matching" and change it from "All" to "Any", that produces the results I would expect from simply clicking Level 1 (4 notes found).  I would expect clicking Level 2 to show notes that are tagged Level 2 or Level 3.

 

So basically, it would just be a matter of adding child tags, if any, to the search when a tag is clicked and making the default matching setting "Any" instead of "All".  This could be an option, of course.  This would be perfect because you could tag most notes with a single tag that is most specific and be able to see it when any of the broader tags are clicked.  This wouldn't clutter your notes up with a bunch of tags and you could move things around and change hierarchies without making any changes to the notes themselves.  This also wouldn't require any changes to the database structure which would make the change easier and wouldn't affect anyone who doesn't want to turn the option on.

One problem here is that Evernote search is either AND or OR (any:), so anything that operates as you suggest might muck up a search that's not intended to be an OR search, and lead to confusion, since not all searches are triggered by clicking in the tag tree. For example, if you started by clicking on a notebook, then started ctrl-clicking around in the tag tree, you would get an any: notebook:SomeNotebook tag:tag1 tag:tag2 type of search when you might have been intending that all notes should be in nootbook SomeNotebook. Pretty fair potential for user confusion there.