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= The Acts As Taggable Mixin
== Installation
To install or update the gem, simply execute:
gem install acts_as_taggable
To use the 'acts_as_taggable' library in your Rails application after installing
the gem, add this line at the end of your 'config/environment.rb' file:
require_gem 'acts_as_taggable'
== Usage Instructions
To use the acts_as_taggable mixin with your ActiveRecord objects, you must use
a normalized database schema for tagging (also know as folksnomies).
This means that you must have a table solely for holding tag names. Usually,
this table is named 'tags' having at least 2 columns: primary key (usually
an autoincrement integer called 'id' - the AR standard for PKs) and a 'name'
columns, usually a varchar. You must also have a defined ActiveRecord model
class that relates to this table, by default called 'Tag'.
For associating tags to your objects you also must have join tables that are
composed of at least 2 columns: the tags table foreign key (by default 'tag_id')
and your taggable object table foreign key.
If you´re using the simple has_and_belongs_to_many model, you must NOT have a
primary key (usually an 'id' column) defined on the join table. If you´re using
a full join model, you must add a primary key column to the join table. Please
see the RDoc documentation on acts_as_taggable macro and the :join_class_name
option for the differences between these two approaches.
For example, suppose you are tagging photos and you hold your photo data thru
the Photo model and on the 'photos' table. Your database schema would look
something like this (example suited for MySQL):
CREATE TABLE `tags` (
`id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`name` varchar(255) default NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
)
CREATE TABLE `tags_photos` (
`tag_id` int(11) NOT NULL,
`photo_id` int(11) NOT NULL
)
CREATE TABLE `photos` (
`id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`title` varchar(255) default NULL,
`author_name` varchar(255) default NULL,
`image_path` varchar(255) default NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
)
You would normally define 2 models to relate to these tables:
class Tag < ActiveRecord::Base
end
class Photo < ActiveRecord::Base
acts_as_taggable
end
Now you can easily apply and search for tags on photos in your Rails application.
This assumes you´re using only default naming conventions. For using the mix-in
with non-standard naming conventions, please see the proper RDoc documentation.
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