OK, a bit of clarity because I just discovered another idiosyncrasy in the way that this seems to be working for me. I experimentally transferred ownership of a folder and the new owner is still unable to see the tags within that folder. It seems that only the old owner (now listed as a co-owner) is able to see the tags applied within that folder.

Are tags somehow related to users? I'm wondering if Box.net might consider altering this so that a tag works the way that you would expect it to. Either that or allow for the tags to be listed as part of the "get_file_info" method as this guy suggests: http://community.box.net/boxnet/topic...

Hi Eric,

It is the case that tags are associated with users. When it comes to collaboration the tags can be exceptionally challenging, and still an area of discussion among our product team. For instance, we have to consider the case in which a collaborator on a folder tags an item with too many tags, filling up the tags lists of other individuals.

Having said that, you may have still encountered an oddity in our API. Is it the case that a user is seeing a different set of tags in the website than when the get_account_tree API method returns results for that same user? Any additional information, perhaps some sample API output if that doesn't contain proprietary information, would be appreciated.

Hi Eric,

Just thought I'd add that we've moved your question from the regular Box.net forum to our new developer forum, in case you're confused about why it's now here.

Thanks,
Alex

Yes, it is the case that a user is seeing a different set of tags when logging in to the web admin than when authenticating via the API method. What I discovered is that, in order to see all the tags applied to files in a particular tree, a user must be listed as the owner of that tree. I've actually come up with a work around for our particular instance: we've put all the files that we want to access that in that way into a particular directory and then have one "owner" user account that is calling the API method.

The problem that I kept running into earlier was this: if I authenticate as a co-owner of that directory, I can get the files (and attributes of each file) in the REST response but not the tags associated with the files (which are children of the file in the REST response), even if the co-owner is the one that applied the tags to the files. All I get is an opening and closing "tags" tag as a child of each file in the account tree.

Thanks for any help you might be able to give me on this. I've got my application working for the time being with the work around I listed above but really the ideal situation would be to be able to see the tags applied to a file no matter who you were (as long as you had rights to the file). Perhaps it would be easier to manage if tag info were part of the "get_file_info" method? Or maybe a "all_tags" parameter could return all of the tag info no matter who put it on there? Or, if the issue is having too many tags in the "collaborated tags" pool, maybe some kind of administrator level tag management tool would work (so certain tags would only be available to certain roles).

Anyways, thanks for the quick response,

Eric

OK, I know this is turning into a never-ending saga but I've just discovered another strange behavior vis-a-vis tagging and the API method. If a co-owner goes through and tags a bunch of files in a tree, and then the owner goes and tags something in that tree that hadn't been tagged by the co-owner (that is, there were no tags applied by anyone), the only tags that get returned via the API method when authenticating as the owner are owner's tags that were applied to the file that hadn't been tagged (although all the tags still show up in the web admin for both users).

Very strange and actually explains some of the unexplained stuff that was happening to me earlier today.

PS It seems that the way to solve this is to have the co-owner go in and tag stuff again. Then all the tags magically re-appear.

I'd think that If I can see a tag attached to a file/folder in the Box acct, the same would be true through the API.

Can't rely on the tag vis the API.

Hi Eric and Lu,

I'm sorry for the slow reply on our end. I want you to know that we haven't lost track of this discussion. These past few days have just kept us a bit more busy than usual, with Salesforce.com's CloudStock conference coming up. After those festivities are over (tomorrow) we'll come back to this conversation.

As a quick note, the issue of tagging in our API as well as handling a user's own tags vs collaborated tags have been discussed internally for quite a while, but then had a lull in customer questions. We do see that we need to put more time into tagging, both in our API methods and our basic design. I'll follow up on this with better details early this week.

Thanks for replying to this. Looking forward to seeing how this gets resolved. (It's Eric again. My box.net ID differs from my Get Satisfaction ID)

Quick update: we have a couple proposed API enhancements to help you both with your projects, but we need at least one more day to discuss options internally (and from there, we may need some time to implement a proposal if we get a green light for this)

Hi Jeremy, We came across with the same "tags" problem while developing iPad app. You re saying that "may need some time to implement a proposal " Could you clarify how much time this may take. As we really need to have the app to be ready in next 10 days
Thank you

Hi Alex,

Unfortunately, this will not be resolved within a week. This is less a bug than a design issue. We are continuing to discuss the best workflow for handling tags within collaborations folders (such as what should happen to all invited collaborators of one folder, when one collaborator in adds many tags to that folder). We have to maintain a good level of consistency in our API, so sometimes we won't update the API to coincide with a feature on the site until the feature is finalized.

The priority has increased for handling this matter within our API. I'll provide an ETA as soon as we have one, but unfortunatelyI would expect this to take more than 1-2 weeks.

I'm sorry for this complication, but please feel free to elaborate on your intended use of the tags, so that we can discuss possible workarounds. If you would rather not mention details on the forum, you can also email us at developers_at_box.net

Hello,

Are there any updates on this topic? I've been doing some testing and found that if a collaborator adds a tag to a document/folder, the owner of the folder is able to retrieve all tags (including the tag added by the collaborator) using the export_tags function. However, when a user adds a tag to their folder, shares it, the person it was shared with will get NULL when retrieving the list of tags (export_tags). Is there any feedback in regards to this topic? updates? THANK YOU!