# TAGS

## OVERVIEW

Tags are a powerful feature of AyaNova that can be used to group or categorize objects for reporting, searching and selection.
Tags are short strings of text that are shared between all users and all major objects in AyaNova. 
Objects can have more than one tag and completely different object types (e.g. Parts, and Users) can have the same tag.


## WHAT ARE THEY FOR?
Tags are used for any purpose that makes sense for *your* business.  AyaNova does not limit how tags are used and allows nearly everything to be tagged.  

By tagging related objects you can more easily select them as a whole for things like searches in [select lists](ay-start-form-select-list.md), reporting, business metrics, graphs and charts, process control etc.

Because you can use multiple tags on each object and multiple different object types can share the same tags you can use tags for several different purposes at the same time.
For example both a Customer and a Service technician could share the same tag "zone1" and you could then limit reporting to only items tagged "zone1" if that makes sense for your business.

You might use a tag to indicate the steps in a process that an object goes through, for example a Quote for a customer may require several staff members to put it together so the service manager may put all the tags of each department that must work in turn with that quote and as each one completes their part they remove their tag until it's completed.
Each department can view a list filtered by their particular tag so they can see what needs to be done.

## TAG FORMAT
You can enter any text you want for a tag as long as it's less than 255 characters, lower case and has no spaces in it.  Spaces are not allowed in tags and when creating a tag spaces will automatically be converted to dashes.
 
## SELECTING A TAG
Tags are selected on forms with the tag control.
Multiple tags can be set for each object.

Enter text into the tag control which will search the server for previously entered tags as you type text into it.  If a matching tag is found it will appear in the selection list below.  Click on a tag in the list to add it to the collection.

## CREATING A TAG
If the text you type into the tag control turns up no results, the control will offer to add it as a new tag by showing an Add icon below.  Click on the icon to add the tag to the collection.  Once this object is saved that tag will now show up in future tag searches for all users.

## DELETING A TAG
To remove a tag from an object click on the remove icon beside it in the tag control and save the record.