Rails%203%20In%20Action

This chapter covers
� Tagging specific records for easier searching
� Restricting user access to tagging functionality
� Searching for specific tags or specific states
of a ticket
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Tagging
In chapter 10, you saw how to give your tickets states (New, Open, and Closed) so
that their progress can be indicated.
In this chapter, you’ll see how to give your tickets tags. Tags are useful for grouping
similar tickets together into things such as iterations 1 or similar feature sets. If
you didn’t have tags, you could crudely group tickets together by setting a ticket’s
title to something such as “Tag - [name].” This method, however, is messy and difficult
to sort through. Having a group of tickets with the same tag will make them
much, much easier to find.
To manage tags, you’ll set up a Tag model, which will have a
has_and_belongs_to_many association to the Ticket model. You’ll set up a join
table for this association, which is a table that contains foreign key fields for each
1 For example, by using a process such as Agile, feature sets, or any other method of grouping.