Tags and filtering

A tag is made by being used

In the Tags field on the job form you type names, separated by commas. A name already in the workspace is offered by the autocomplete; a name that is not is created by saving the job. There is no screen for managing tags, because there is nothing to manage: a tag is a name and a colour, shared between jobs, and it exists for exactly as long as at least one job carries it.

The colour is data

Every tag is given one of the bright colours legible on a dark ground when it is created, and carries it everywhere — in the list, on the dashboard, in the filter. The colour cannot be chosen or changed; it is a distinction, not a meaning. If you want the colour to say something, the tag's name says it.

Tidying up

Removing a tag from a job is the cross beside it on the form, or an edit to the list of names. A tag no job carries afterwards disappears from the workspace — and is created afresh next time it is used, with a different colour. The same happens when a job is deleted: tags only it had go with it.

Facets on the job list

The job list is fetched whole and narrowed in the browser, so the filter responds instantly. Above the list are three sets of clickable labels — agent, tag and state — and a box for searching in the name. How they compose:

• OR within a set: a second agent widens the list, because few jobs have two given agents at once and AND would empty the list almost every time on the second click,
• AND across sets: a tag added to an agent narrows the list.

Both the agent and the tag sets also have a "none" option — jobs with no agent and jobs with no tag — because a job with no agent is the one you want to know about first.

What the number beside a tag says

The number beside each label in the filter is counted against the other sets, not against the whole list. So it reads as "this many remain if I add this": with the agent web-01 selected, backup (3) says that three jobs on web-01 have the backup tag — not how many have backup altogether. A number in a set where you already have something selected is the count the selection would widen to, because within a set things compose with OR.

State is the latest run

The state set has four positions, collapsed out of the finer run states:

"Latest run" is the same one whose icon the column in the table shows: for a job on several agents, the newest of them, not a verdict over all of them. A filter that disagreed with the icon on the row would be worse than a coarse one.

One job's run history is filtered differently — on the server — and why is on its own page.