Managing a “Forest” of Decision Trees Using Tagging

As Zingtree is getting more and more larger companies as clients, we’ve received a lot of requests for being able to better manage a large library of trees. Some customers are planning on creating hundreds or even thousands of trees.  Our latest update makes it even easier to locate and organize large decision tree “forests.”

First Step: Tag Your Trees!

If you haven’t done so already, you should tag your trees. A tag is like a category – any tree can have multiple tags. This is the first step to being better organized.

To tag a tree:

1. Start at My Trees, and select a tree.
2. Go to the Settings tool.
3. Enter a tag, or pick from a list of existing tags:
4. Click Update Settings to save.

Locating Trees by Tag

Once you’ve tagged your trees, Zingtree has a few different ways to make it easy to stay organized:

• For Authors: Filter your list of trees by tag in the My Trees tool.
• For Authors: Use Tree Search to enter a list of tags to find trees that have any or all of the desired tags.
• For Agents or End-Users: Authors can use new Macros to present a list of trees to an end-user that contain any or all tags in a list.

Authors: Filter by Tag in the My Trees Tool

When you use the My Trees tool, you’ll see an option at the top right for Has Tag. This contains a list of all the decision tree tags in use for your organization:

Select a tag, and you’ll see all the trees that have that tag.

Authors: Use Tree Search

For more powerful searching using tags, use the Search button in My Trees. You have four different search options. These two apply to tag matching:

• Match Tree Tags (any): Enter a comma separated list of tags. The results return a list of trees that include any of the tags in the list.
• Match Tree Tags (all):  Enter a comma separated list of tags. The results return a list of trees that include all of the tags in the list.

Using Macros to Present Lists of Trees by Tag

Inside the content area of any tree, you can insert a special macro to show all the trees in your organization that match any or all tags in a list. You can examine the Tree Tag Demo in the Zingtree Gallery to see how this is done.

The two macros you can insert into the content area are:

• ##treetaglist-any: tags##
• ##treetaglist-all: tags##

In the examples above, replace tags with a comma separated list of tags. treetaglist-any will return a list of trees that match any of the tags in the list.  treetaglist-all returns only those trees that contain all the tags in the list.

Examples:

#treetaglist-any: demo,gallery## – matches trees that are tagged with either demo or gallery.

#treetaglist-all: demo,gallery## – matches trees that are tagged with both demo and gallery.

Shortcut: When editing a node, you can insert these macros from the Templates editing tool in the Content editor:

Bonus: Dynamic Lists

When publishing a tree, if you add a tags= parameter to the tree URL, you can dynamically import the list of tags used by the tree macros.  Be sure to separate the tags with | characters. Example:

http://zingtree.com/host.php?style=panels&tree_id=287688184&tags=demo|gallery

Inside the tree, this macro will list trees that have tags that match ALL the tags in the passed-in tags= parameter:

##treetaglist-all:##

This macro will list  trees that have tags that match ANY tags in the passed-in tags= parameter:

##treetaglist-any:##

Node #6 from the Tree Tag Demo in the Zingtree Gallery shows how this is done. Try it!

Integrations: Dynamic Tree Lists by Passing Tags

Our customers Corey and John asked for a way to send a list of tags from their Help Desk system, and open a specific tree or show a list of matching trees. Here’s how to do it.

1. Go to My Trees, and click Search.
2. Use one of the tree tag searches.
3. In the search results, click the Integration Link Template button at the bottom of the page.  This will show you a URL to use as the basis for linking from your Help Desk/CRM system to the Zingtree search.  You can add style parameters to this link from the Advanced Hosting Options page as well to ensure your trees appear with the desired look and feel.

Example:

This link is derived from a search in the Zingtree Gallery. The search, style and transition parameters are changed from the template example to customize the result.

http://zingtree.com/host-trees.php?jump=1&key=6a103737e44e4aa6e1e4b6b0bcb46f83&type=treetag-all&search=demo,gallery&style=panels&transition=fade

Credits

Thanks to Corey, John, Elise, Trey and a few others for sharing their tree management needs.  If you have a suggestion, comment, or question, please reach out and talk to us!