Tags do not appear in Right-click Menu

[simpsus]

I am sorry if I am breaking lp paradigms here, but I just wanted to say that in kolmis branch for taggable transactions the transactions do not show up in the right click menu, even after I entered a Tag manually in the database. If I (in the database) link a Tag to a transaction, the Tag does also not get shown for removal in the right-click menu.

[simpsus (bastian-kennel)]

sorry for the spam, I wanted to assign a very low importance, but appearently I am not allowed to do that.

[simpsus (bastian-kennel)]

I did further investigation and it turns out this does indeed work. I noticed that for removal all tags are shown. Please find attached a patch that reduces this to only the tags applied to the selected transactions.

I am sorry the patch is so big. All I did was a 5 line change and some debug to understand whats going on....

[Michael Rooney (mrooney)]

Thanks for the report! I've subscribed Karel since it is his branch, and set the Importance for you. Also, confirming your own bugs defeats the purpose of the "Confirmed" status :)

I guess I better check out transaction tagging!

[Karel Kolman (kolmis)]

simpsus:
i guess it's better to use whitespace stripping when creating a patch
 bzr diff --diff-options -w > my.patch
(this is what i found out when trying to see what your patch actually does)

for clarity i'm attaching the whitespace changes stripped patch.

now i have a few of questions regarding the bug and the patch:
1. are the tags shown in the right-click actions or not ? (i'm sorry, but the bug title says they aren't and later you posted "this does indeed work"
2. do i understand it right that your patch is supposed to filter the tags listed in the removal action to tags appearing in the selected transactions ?
3. what do you think about unused tag removal upon application startup (since you commented that out in your patch) ?

[simpsus (bastian-kennel)]

Thanks for the reply.

Answers
1) It works. At first I was too silly to enter a tag in the db and start wxbanker unlocked
2) Exactly
3) I think it doesn't make any sense to delete unused tags. I would expect a Tag Menu where I can delete (and add, and rename) Tags. My commenting out was rather due to the fact that the programm killed my database entries upon exit if I didn't assign them.

I extended my patch:
- no whitespaces
- it now filters the Tags listed for adding to the tags _not_ present in the selected transaction
- it contains a new item "new Tag" which brings up a dialog asking for a name. The tag is then created and attached to the transactions.

I ran into a persistency problem on the last bullet point. The new tag gets shown in the "tags" column, but upon rightclicking, there is a "noneType" error, because the Tag is None. Restarting the application, all is fine. Perhaps you have an idea.

Another note: I did not know how to handle the internationalization issue, so i just put my 2 strings in englisch

I had a discussion with a mate about tags for transactions and more generally if tags are appropriate (versus the subaccount structure of other programs). I would like to know what you think:

Do you plan on hierarchical tags?
Do you think it makes sense to include a % in the (transaction, tag) tuple to enable the user to distribute the amount among tags?

cheers

[Karel Kolman (kolmis)]

- handle i18n strings by writing _("text") instead of "text", such strings can then be extracted for translation
- i adapted your patch to blend in with the wxBanker coding style
- unused tags are still deleted upon app startup, since the tags are meant to be simple labels, i find this behavior reasonable, but will think about adding an option specifying this behavior

as for hierarchical tags:
my view on this is that i would like wxbanker to have
1. simple text tags
2. predefined hierarchical categories (Bills -> Electric, Income -> Salary, etc..)
i chose to implement the first one at first

a transaction could than have assigned multiple tags and one category (or is it reasonable to allow multiple categories to be assigned as well ?)

i don't quite understand what you meant by "Do you think it makes sense to include a % in the (transaction, tag) tuple to enable the user to distribute the amount among tags?"

[Michael Rooney (mrooney)]

On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 2:00 PM, Karel Kolman <email address hidden> wrote:
> as for hierarchical tags:
> my view on this is that i would like wxbanker to have
> 1. simple text tags
> 2. predefined hierarchical categories (Bills -> Electric, Income -> Salary, etc..)
> i chose to implement the first one at first

Instead of having categories versus tags I was thinking everything
would be tags but you could have sub-tags. So if I tag something with
"Bills/Electric" I have implicitly created a Bills tag and an Electric
sub-tag for Bills. This seems like the easiest way to enter such
things, and you could autocomplete on it as well.

>
> a transaction could than have assigned multiple tags and one category
> (or is it reasonable to allow multiple categories to be assigned as well
> ?)

I think the above suggestion eliminates this issue perhaps?

>
> i don't quite understand what you meant by "Do you think it makes sense
> to include a % in the (transaction, tag) tuple to enable the user to
> distribute the amount among tags?"
>

I think perhaps the suggestion is to be able to say that a transaction
is perhaps 80% one tag and 20% another?

--
Michael Rooney
<email address hidden>

[simpsus (bastian-kennel)]

@MRooney: I agree with your comments.

Based on this, my mate and me wrote a blueprint for this: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/wxbanker/+spec/advanced-tags

[Michael Rooney (mrooney)]

Let me change this from Fix Committed to Triaged since it isn't committed in a main wxBanker branch; this will confuse me into marking as released by accident :)

Hopefully I can figure out a clean way to integrate tags soon (I would like them myself), such that they don't complicate the UI for people who don't need them, but are discoverable and simple for those who do. Any suggestions welcome; I was thinking maybe just having a checking under Settings -> "Enable transaction tagging". Choosing this would perhaps unhide a column in the transaction view and enable the relevant features. Thoughts?

[simpsus (bastian-kennel)]

I am not a UI expert, but I think the time is near to have enough configurables for a preferences window, especially if you keep categories in mind (https://code.launchpad.net/~kaboom/wxbanker/advancedCategories) which is also ready for merge since June.

I like the idea of the right-click context menu, but am open to other solutions.

I would love to see the features present in a soon-to-come version even if the UI is not 100% there (label as beta perhaps?) to see how it perfomrs in real life. This could then provide valuable experience for the UI discussion as well. At this point, I am in the dark...

[Michael Rooney (mrooney)]

I think you are right, it is probably about time for a Settings ->
Preferences menu. In 0.6 I added a button next to the
add/rename/remove account buttons to configure account-specific
settings, for now just editing recurring transactions but later for
supporting/editing per-account currencies. However I don't think that
button would make sense for global wxBanker configurations.

[Michael Rooney (mrooney)]

I guess I need to revisit this now that the implemented method of tagging is twitter-style hash tags, since you don't need a right-click menu and can do everything via the description. However, this is terribly undiscoverable, so I'm thinking about adding a "Tags" sub-menu to the current right-click menu matching the mock-up I've attached. Any thoughts? I hope it should make tagging discoverable and easy to work with for a first version.

[Michael Rooney (mrooney)]

I guess each tag entry could have a sub-menu as well with items like "remove this tag" and "view transactions with this tag", which you can already do but maybe not in obvious ways.

[Michael Rooney (mrooney)]

Here is an updated mock-up with the sub-menu and a better tag dialog.

[Michael Rooney (mrooney)]

Implemented as mentioned in comments 12-14, please let me know if anyone has any thoughts or ideas for improvement or discoverability!

That's should finish up Tags 1.0 which means 0.8 is ready, so a release is imminent.