Tagify - lightweight input "tags" script

Transforms an input field or a textarea into a Tags component, in an easy, customizable way, with great performance and tiny code footprint.

Documentation & Demos

Table of contents

• Installation
• Selling points
• What can Tagify do
• Building the project
• Adding tags dynamically
• Ajax whitelist
• Edit tags
• DOM Templates
• Suggestions selectbox
• React wrapper
• Angular wrapper
• jQuery version
• FAQ
• Methods
• Events
• Settings

Installation

npm i @yaireo/tagify --save

// usage:
import Tagify from '@yaireo/tagify'

var tagify = new Tagify(...)

Selling points

• JS minified ~21kb (~7kb GZIP)
• CSS minified ~7kb (~2kb GZIP) - well-crafted flexible code
• Easily customized
• Easily change direction to RTL via the SCSS file only
• No other inputs are used beside the original, and its value is kept in sync
• ARIA accessibility support
• Exposed custom events
• Internet Explorer - A polyfill script can be used: tagify.polyfills.min.js in /dist

What can Tagify do

• Can be applied on input & textarea elements
• Supports mix content (text and tags together)
• Supports whitelist
• Supports blacklists
• Shows suggestions selectbox (flexiable settings & styling)
• Allows setting aliases to suggestions for easier searching
• Auto-complete input as-you-type (whitelist first match)
• Can paste in multiple values: tag 1, tag 2, tag 3
• Tags can be created by Regex delimiter or by pressing the "Enter" key / focusing of the input
• Validate tags by Regex pattern
• Tags are editable
• Supports read-only mode to the whole componenet or per-tag
• Each tag can have any properties desired (class, data-whatever, readonly...)
• Automatically disallow duplicate tags (vis "settings" object)
• Tags can be trimmed via hellip by giving max-width to the tag element in your CSS

Building the project

Simply run gulp in your terminal, from the project's path (Gulp should be installed first).

Source files are this path: /src/

Output files, which are automatically generated using Gulp, are in: /dist/

The rest of the files are most likely irrelevant.

Adding tags dynamically

var tagify = new Tagify(...);

tagify.addTags(["banana", "orange", "apple"])

// or add tags with pre-defined propeties

tagify.addTags([{value:"banana", color:"yellow"}, {value:"apple", color:"red"}, {value:"watermelon", color:"green"}])

output value

There are two possible ways to get the value of the tags:

1. Access the tagify's instance's value prop: tagify.value (Array of tags)
2. Access the original input's value: inputElm.value (Stringified Array of tags)

Ajax whitelist

Dynamically-loaded suggestions list (whitelist) from the server (as the user types) is a frequent need to many.

Below is a basic example using the fetch API. I advise to abort the last request on any input before starting a new request.

var input = document.querySelector('input'),
    tagify = new Tagify(input, {whitelist:[]}),
    controller; // for aborting the call

// listen to any keystrokes which modify tagify's input
tagify.on('input', onInput)

function onInput( e ){
  var value = e.detail;
  tagify.settings.whitelist.length = 0; // reset the whitelist

  // https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/AbortController/abort
  controller && controller.abort();
  controller = new AbortController();

  fetch('http://get_suggestions.com?value=' + value, {signal:controller.signal})
    .then(RES => RES.json())
    .then(function(whitelist){
      tagify.settings.whitelist = whitelist;
      tagify.dropdown.show.call(tagify, value); // render the suggestions dropdown
    })
}

Edit tags

Tags which aren't read-only can be edited by double-clicking them.

The value is saved on blur or by pressnig enter key. Pressing Escaspe will revert the change trigger blur. ctrlz will revert the change if an edited tag was marked as not valid (perhaps duplicate or blacklisted)

DOM Templates

It's possible to control the templates for the following HTML elements tagify generates by modying the settings.templates Object with your own custom functions which should output a string.

The defaults are:

templates : {
    wrapper(input, settings){
        return `<tags class="tagify ${settings.mode ? "tagify--mix" : "" } ${input.className}" ${settings.readonly ? 'readonly' : ''}>
            <span contenteditable data-placeholder="${input.placeholder || '&#8203;'}" class="tagify__input"></span>
        </tags>`
    },

    tag(v, tagData){
        return `<tag title='${v}' contenteditable='false' spellcheck="false" class='tagify__tag ${tagData.class ? tagData.class : ""}' ${this.getAttributes(tagData)}>
            <x title='' class='tagify__tag__removeBtn'></x><div><span class='tagify__tag-text'>${v}</span></div>
        </tag>`
    },

    dropdownItem( item ){
        var sanitizedValue = (item.value || item).replace(/`|'/g, "&#39;");
        return `<div ${this.getAttributes(item)} class='tagify__dropdown__item ${item.class ? item.class : ""}'>${sanitizedValue}</div>`;
    }
}

Suggestions selectbox

The suggestions selectbox is shown is a whitelist Array of Strings or Objects was passed in the settings when the Tagify instance was created. Suggestions list will only be rendered if there are at least two matching sugegstions (case-insensetive).

The selectbox dropdown will be appended to the document's <body> element and will be rendered by default in a position below (bottom of) the Tagify element. Using the keyboard arrows up/down will highlight an option from the list, and hitting the Enter key to select.

It is possible to tweak the selectbox dropdown via 2 settings:

• enabled - this is a numeral value which tells Tagify when to show the suggestions dropdown, when a minimum of N characters were typed.
• maxItems - Limits the number of items the suggestions selectbox will render

var input = document.querySelector('input'),
    tagify = new Tagify(input, {
        whitelist : ['aaa', 'aaab', 'aaabb', 'aaabc', 'aaabd', 'aaabe', 'aaac', 'aaacc'],
        dropdown : {
            classname : "color-blue",
            enabled   : 3,
            maxItems  : 5
        }
    });

Will render:

<div class="tagify__dropdown" style="left: 993.5px; top: 106.375px; width: 616px;">
    <div class="tagify__dropdown__item" value="aaab">aaab</div>
    <div class="tagify__dropdown__item" value="aaabb">aaabb</div>
    <div class="tagify__dropdown__item" value="aaabc">aaabc</div>
    <div class="tagify__dropdown__item" value="aaabd">aaabd</div>
    <div class="tagify__dropdown__item" value="aaabe">aaabe</div>
</div>

By default searching the suggestions is using fuzzy-search (see settings).

If you wish to assign alias to items (in your suggestion list), add the searchBy property to whitelist items you wish to have an alias for. In the blow example, when typing any of the words from the searchBy property, the suggestion listen will match "Israel".

Example for a suggestion item alias

whitelist = [
    ...
    { value:'Israel', code:'IL', searchBy:'holy land, desert, middle east' },
    ...
]

mixed-content

To use this feature it must be toggled - see settings.

When mixing text with tags, the original textarea (or input) element will have a value as follows:

[[cartman]]⁠ and [[kyle]]⁠ do not know [[Homer simpson]]⁠

If the inital value of the textarea or input is formatted as the above example, tagify will try to automatically convert everything between [[ & ]] to a tag, if tag exists in the whitelist, so make sure when the Tagify instance is initialized, that it has tags with the correct value property that match the same values that appear between [[ & ]].

React

A Tagify React component is exported as <Tags> from react.tagify.js:

Check the codepen demo for a live React integration example

Angular

TagifyComponent which will be used by your template as <tagify>

Example:

<div>
  testing tagify wrapper
  <tagify [settings]="settings"
          (add)="onAdd($event)"
          (remove)="onRemove($event)">
  </tagify>
  <button (click)="clearTags()">clear</button>
  <button (click)="addTags()">add Tags</button>
</div>

TagifyService

(The tagifyService is a singletone injected by angular, do not create a new instance of it)

import {Component, OnDestroy} from '@angular/core';
import {TagifyService} from 'ngTagify';

@Component({
  selector: 'app-root',
  templateUrl: './app.component.html',
  styleUrls: ['./app.component.css']
})
export class AppComponent implements OnDestroy {

  constructor(private tagifyService: TagifyService) {}
  public settings = { blacklist: ['fucking', 'shit']};

  onAdd(tagify) {
    console.log('added a tag', tagify);
  }

  onRemove(tags) {
    console.log('removed a tag', tags);
  }
  clearTags() {
    this.tagifyService.removeAll();
  }
  addTags() {
    this.tagifyService.addTags(['this', 'is', 'cool']);
  }
  ngOnDestroy() {
    this.tagifyService.destroy();
  }
}

jQuery version

jQuery.tagify.js

A jQuery wrapper verison is also available, but I advise not using it because it's basically the exact same as the "normal" script (non-jqueryfied) and all the jQuery's wrapper does is allowing to chain the event listeners for ('add', 'remove', 'invalid')

$('[name=tags]')
    .tagify()
    .on('add', function(e, tagName){
        console.log('added', tagName)
    });

Accessing methods can be done via the .data('tagify'):

$('[name=tags]').tagify();
// get tags from the server (ajax) and add them:
$('[name=tags]').data('tagify').addTags('aaa, bbb, ccc')

FAQ

• Double-click tag fires both "edit" & "click" custom events
• Manualy open the suggestions dropdown
• Render your own suggestions dropdown
• Allow max length on mix mode
• Always show dropdown
• Limit the length of a tag value (minimum & maximum)
• Mixed mode initial value
• Random colors for each tag
• Format input value for server side

Methods

Name	Info
destroy	Reverts the input element back as it was before Tagify was applied
removeAllTags	Removes all tags and resets the original input tag's value property
addTags	Accepts a String (word, single or multiple with a delimiter), an Array of Objects (see above) or Strings
removeTag	Removes a specific tag. Argument is the tag DOM element to be removed. When nothing passed, removes last tag (see source code)
loadOriginalValues	Converts the input's value into tags. This method gets called automatically when instansiating Tagify
getTagIndexByValue
getTagElmByValue
parseMixTags	Converts a String argument ([[foo]]⁠ and [[bar]]⁠ are..) into HTML with mixed tags & texts

Events

Name	Info
add	A tag has been added
remove	A tag has been removed
invalid	A tag has been added but did not pass vaildation. See event detail
input	Input event, when a tag is being typed/edited. e.detail exposes value, inputElm & isValid
click	Clicking a tag. Exposes the tag element, its index & data
edit	A tag has been edited
dropdown:show	Suggestions dropdown is to be rendered. The dropdown DOM node is passed in the callback, see demo.
dropdown:hide	Suggestions dropdown has been removed from the DOM

Settings

Name	Type	Default	Info
delimiters	String	","	[regex] split tags by any of these delimiters. Example: `",
pattern	String	null	Validate input by REGEX pattern (can also be applied on the input itself as an attribute) Ex: `/[1-9]/``
mode	String	null	use 'mix' as value to allow mixed-content. The 'pattern' setting must be set to some character.
duplicates	Boolean	false	Should duplicate tags be allowed or not
enforceWhitelist	Boolean	false	Should ONLY use tags allowed in whitelist
autocomplete	Boolean	true	Tries to autocomplete the input's value while typing (match from whitelist)
whitelist	Array	[]	An array of tags which only they are allowed
blacklist	Array	[]	An array of tags which aren't allowed
addTagOnBlur	Boolean	true	Automatically adds the text which was inputed as a tag when blur event happens
callbacks	Object	{}	Exposed callbacks object to be triggered on events: 'add' / 'remove' tags
maxTags	Number	Infinity	Maximum number of allowed tags. when reached, adds a class "hasMaxTags" to <Tags>
templates	Object	wrapper, tag, dropdownItem	Object consisting of functions which return template strings
transformTag	Function	undefined	Takes a tag input as argument and returns a transformed value
keepInvalidTags	Boolean	false	If true, do not remove tags which did not pass validation
skipInvalid	Boolean	false	If true, do not temporarily add invalid tags before automatically removing them
backspace	*	true	On backspace: (true) - remove last tag, (`"edit"``) - edit last tag
dropdown.enabled	Number	2	Minimum characters to input to show the suggestions list. "false" to disable
dropdown.maxItems	Number	10	Maximum items to show in the suggestions list dropdown
dropdown.classname	String	""	Custom class name for the dropdown suggestions selectbox
dropdown.itemTemplate	Function	""	Returns a custom string for each list item in the dropdown suggestions selectbox
dropdown.fuzzySearch	Boolean	true	Enables filtering dropdown items values' by string containing and not only beginning
dropdown.position	String	null	manual will not render the dropdown, and you would need to do it yourself. See "events" section.