Title: Reclassify | Change Labels (Tags) - on Articles or Paragraphs

Note: At present, TeamPage refers to "tags" rather than the original term "labels." The general capabilities referred to here are relatively current - though the UI has changed slightly and you can assume any reference to Label(s) implies Tag(s) in the current UI.

Changing Labels (tags)

At any point after posting an article or comment, you can change the labels on an paragraph, article, or a batch of articles.

Anyone who has Change Labels permission in a given project can add or remove labels from that project to any article they can read.

You may wish to change labels for a number of reasons:

To indicate a status change, e.g. from to do to done
To add finer-grain detail to a taxonomy, e.g. breaking down contacts into friends and leads.
To recover from an over-ambitious attempt at fine-grain taxonomy, e.g. merging Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire into one label, Northeast.

Traction makes changing labels a safe and lightweight operation, and it provides specialized reporting on label changes. For example, a standard Traction idiom -- showing the list of articles to which the done label was added on the newspage -- can fulfill the need for status reports and prevent having to write them

Changing Article-Level Labels

You can specify labels for any number of paragraphs in an article. We refer to labels that appear on the title of the article as article-level labels; they thematically apply to the entire article, as opposed to a designated paragraph.

All single article views provide a Change Labels link in the Article Tools menu:

Or you can select the Change Labels option in the Article section of the Context Menu:

Note: The Context Menu has additional shortcut options for changing labels including

Action (explained down below)
Add to Section (which lets you select a label driven page section and apply the necessary labels which apply to the selected section)
Remove Label (which lets you quickly remove one or more labels that are already on the article), and
Add Label (which lets you navigate to a Project and a Label to add one label).

The Change Labels dialogue appears. If you have permission to Define Labels in the project, you will see a Create New Label link in the upper right of the dialogue. In this example, the FAQ label has been added:

After you click done, the article is updated, now including the FAQ label:

Changing Paragraph Level Labels

To change labels on a paragraph, select Change Labels (or as relevant use the Action, Add to Section, Add Label, or Remove Label options) from the Paragraph section of the context menu.

The Change Labels dialogue appears. In this example, the Question and To Do labels have been chosen, and you window header says "Change Labels HR6.02" to indicate the paragraph number to which the action will apply.

After you click done, the article is updated, now including the Question and To Do labels on the selected paragraph:

Using Custom Label Actions

Custom label actions may have been defined by your administrator in Server Setup - Journal. These may be created to make it easy to do quick actions like removing a todo label and replacing it with a done label, changing priority, assigning issues, or making articles visible to other groups.

By default, Traction provides To Do and Done actions.

Actions are listed under the Action option in the Paragraph section of the context menu.

In this example, the Priority 1, Priority 2, and Priority 3 actions have been defined. The Priority 1 action will add the P1 label while also removing the P2 or P3 label, if present.

The resulting view shows the change:

Using the Checkbox to Change Between To Do and Done

Traction provides a special checkbox control to make it easy to invoke the To Do and Done actions. If your journal has actions named To Do and Done defined, you will see a checkbox to the right of the labels.

Clicking this checkbox will instantly activate either the To Do or Done action (whichever is required to change the state). After a moment, the labels will update in-place without a full page reload.

This makes it very easy to keep checklists in Traction and to check them off as issues are resolved.

Note: If an article has both todo and done labels, the checkbox shows as grey.

Clicking this checkbox will apply the To Do action, which switches all todo labels to done labels.

Change Labels on Multiple Articles (or Multiple Paragraphs)

You can access the batch label change dialogue from the Page Tools menu of a multi-entry view, the Collector, or the context menu.

If you chose Change Labels from the Collector,

from the Page Tools menu of a multi-article view,

or from the Page section of the context menu, even of a single-article view...

...you will be taken to the Change Labels on Multiple Articles page. This is a two-page interface. The first page lists the articles that you want to change. By default, the articles from your view or collection appear. The Change Labels operation will only affect the articles with a checkbox in their row. The checkbox at the top of the column controls all the checkboxes in the column.

You can add another article to the list by typing an Article ID into the box at the bottom of the page (using Internet Explorer you can drag and drop any title or link to an article into the box).

The labels for each article are shown in two groups. The first group is the article-level labels, followed by a blank line, followed the merged labels from all other paragraphs.

When you have selected the articles whose labels you want to change, click the "Edit Labels" button. This takes you to the second page of the interface. At any time, you can switch back to the first page by clicking "Show Selected Articles". You can switch back and forth as often as necessary; all your work will be preserved.

This page is perhaps the most powerful in Traction. Once you are familiar with it, you will find it easy, quick to use, and invaluable.

This page lets you perform four basic operations:

1. Create a new label, which can be used in any of the other operations.

2. Remove an existing label from all the places it appears in any of the listed articles in which it appears.

3. Add a new or existing article-level label to all the listed articles.

4. Replace all instances (whether article- or paragraph-level) of one label with another in all of the listed articles.

There is one more important operation which can be accomplished with this page, but it requires two steps:

5. Add a new or existing label to every article or paragraph where a given label appears in all of the listed articles.

This page lets you specify as many of these operations as you like. When you press the Submit button all the operations you specify will be performed.

As shown above, there are currently no operations specified.

Let's say we want to remove all the todo labels from all the listed articles. We'll do this by adding the todo labels to the Remove Labels list.

In order to add a label to this list, first choose it from the pull-down menu:

Then press the +) icon to add the label to the list:

This adds the first item to the list:

Watch Out! The list above contains only one item. The last row in the list is only used to add additional items. Each item that is actually in the list appears with a (- icon next to it. Clicking the (- removes the item from the list.

Let's add the other todo label. We select it:

We click the +) to add it:

And it appears:

Right now you may be thinking, "Why does one of the labels have a project name listed before it and the other one not?" The answer is that this form was opened from a view focused on the MarketResearch project, so labels from that project are abbreviated (don't show the project name). You can tell the default project by the other controls on this page, which all default to the source project.

Not at all obvious, but now you know.

If we were to submit now, the articles would be stripped of their todo labels, but would be otherwise unchanged.

Let's do more.

Let's create a new label, "Useful Example", and add it to all the articles.

To create a new label, we type it in the "Create a new Label" control. Note that labels all belong to a single project, so you can choose the project in which you want the new label to be created. Let's create it in the Public project.

\

We then press +) to add the label:

Has the new label been created?

No! Nothing happens until you press submit. We're just saying what we want to happen.

So what has happened?

Our new "Useful Example" label has been inserted into the Add Label and Move controls.

In order for anything to happen with the new label, we need to add another operation to the list, which we have yet to do.

Since we wanted to add this label to all the articles, we'll click the +) in the Add Label control:

And the operation is added:

Now you're getting the hang of this!

So far we have three operations defined: remove ::ProductAlpha:todo from everywhere in all listed articles, remove ::MarketResearch:todo from everywhere in all listed articles, and create the label Useful Example in the Public project and add it at the article level in all listed articles.

Time to get fancy.

Let's shoot straight to the 5th case above (we'll cover the 4th on the way). You want to add the label memex everywhere the label content management appears.

That is, we want to change all occurrences...

From

To

content management

content management

memex

This currently needs to be specified using two rules.

Using the move operation, you can specify the first rule:

But hold on! Won't this replace the content management label with the memex label?

If we stop here, absolutely.

We need one more rule.

This second rule says, "in addition to moving content management to memex, move it to itself". I.e. preserve it. Someday this may be a checkbox, or a completely different interface, but for now just think of filling in every row and column in the From/To table above, and create a rule for each row.

From	To
content management	memex
content management	content management

There is a tip with an example right on the page to help you remember this.

Now we have covered all the cases this page can handle.

You can add as many additional rules as you need to express the transformation you wish to accomplish.

Once you are satisfied, you can press submit. A special reclassification article is posted that explains the transformation you just applied:

Each rule is explained.

The two buttons at the bottom let you jump back to the Change Labels form you were just on or view the articles you modified.

Clicking View all articles, we can see that, sure enough, the paragraphs labeled content management are now also labeled memex (and all the other changed were applied too)..

That was certainly harder than clicking a checkbox or using the regular one-paragraph Change Labels form, but much more powerful too. Consider for a moment that this tool can operate on every article in your entire journal. You can use this to reorganize your entire taxonomy while leaving a complete and accessible audit trail. We call this dynamic schema migration. If you're familiar with how difficult it is to reorganize other systems, you might forgive some of the shortcomings of this strange but powerful tool.

By the way, congratulations -- now you're a power user!

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Doc357: Traction User Guide (via Reclassify | Change Labels (tags) - on Articles or Paragraphs)Doc326: What can I do with Traction TeamPage? (via Reclassify | Change Labels (tags) - on Articles or Paragraphs)Doc287: The Collector (via Reclassify | Change Labels (tags) - on Articles or Paragraphs)Doc216: Space Setup - Tags (via Reclassify | Change Labels (tags) - on Articles or Paragraphs)

Article: Doc234 (permalink)
Date: March 22, 2008; 4:15:46 PM Eastern Daylight Time

Author Name: Documentation Importer
Author ID: importer