tags: chapter sortable tags help tutorial

- Sortable tags -

A crucial point to understand is that there is nothing special about 'cost' tag, except that it is a sortable tag. Sortable tags, unlike the regular kind, have a name and a value, separated by a semicolon - where the value can be a number or a string of text. When Tobu sees a sortable tag, it inserts the value of the tag in the column under that tag; when we're dealing with regular tags, an 'x' is inserted to indicate that the tag is present in the record, an empty space indicates that it's not present.

We are not limited to just one sortable tag per item - we can have as many as needed. In our shopping list we might have chosen to have an additional sortable tag called 'priority' and give a value of 1 for high priority, 2 for medium and 3 for low. Let's try this right now - click on each item, add priority tag and hit save. You can now sort items based on their priority, price or title. In fact, you can sort items based on any standard tag as well - records that have the tag will be grouped separately from the records that do not.

Sortable tags will normally be sorted alphabetically if they are textual and numerically if they are numbers. There are a few special values that will be sorted in a different way: short month names, short day names and priority descriptions - 'low', 'medium', 'high', 'urgent'.