Tags and Categories

This wiki page documents the specifications:

• tags: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/wxbanker/+spec/transaction-tagging

• categories: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/wxbanker/+spec/advanced-categories

The goal is to figure out the high-level requirements of tags and categories, figure out the best way to accomplish these, and then adjust the implementation in the branches as necessary. Finally, the end goal is to merge these into trunk!

Each feature should answer two questions:

• Rationale - As a user, what will this enable me to do that I couldn't before?

• User experience - As a user, how will I use/interact with this feature?

Tags

Rationale:

• ability to search easily on specific tags
• a dedicated column in the transaction list for sorting by tag

User experience:

• adding tags while creating a transaction: use #tags like Twitter anywhere in the description which are parsed into tags
• modifying tags on existing transaction:

  • OPTION 1: right-click on a transaction: add tag -> existing tags, new tag, remove tag -> current tags

  • OPTION 2: just modify the description to remove or add #tags
• searching: simply search on the tag name, use #tag to not match arbitrary words in descriptions

Categories

Rationale:

• At the moment, the user can organize transactions only in one dimension: Accounts. While accounts are very necessary, they do not resemble the purpose of spending money at all. A user spends his money for rent, phone, food etc. With categories, the user is able to organize his transaction orthogonal to accounts in a self-defined hierarchy of catgories, making personal controlling possible like: monitoring fix costs, food expenses, luxuries etc etc

User experience:

• Creating a category:
  • marking the parent category, or none and either right-click or use one of the buttons
• adding transactions to a category
  • OPTION 1: drag and drop any selected transaction(s) to the category

  • OPTION 2: select transaction(s) and right-click move to category ==> chose one of the selected

Discussion

• mrooney: add your comments/questions here!

wolfer: tags vs. categories

• what is the distinction between those two and how do we communicate this to the user?
  • categories
    • examples: rent, gas, groceries
    • transactions belong to exactly one category (or split across some in later version), hierarchy
  • tags
    • examples: standing_order, to_pay, ...
    • no hierarchy, transactions may have several tags
• mrooney: looks like some good information, thanks! I've milestoned the tags feature for the next release, 0.8, which should provide some feedback on that and then clear the way for categories in 0.9