Tags vs. custom fields

General Discussion
1

When would you use one or the other?



I would say custom fields are more formal and used longterm. Tags are used more tactical / operational?

2

When would you use one or the other?

I would say custom fields are more formal and used longterm. Tags are used more tactical / operational?

3

One concrete question:
Would you save a persons contact language as tag or custom field?

4

Interesting question. some thoughts:

  1. I am not sure if I can define a custom field as an array of variables and handle it accordingly (from the data types it looks to me that I can only define a list of fixed values). So if that is true, you need use tags if you are looking for an array of significant size.
  2. Also it seems to me that handling an array is well supported in the campaign builder for tags, but not for custom fields.
  3. On the other side it seems that tag handling is not supported much in the REST API - at least I did not find anything about in the documentation.
    So if you expect your contacts to have multiple languages and you dont need to access them with the API tags might be the best choice. If you are expecting just one language per contact, I think you are better off with custom fields.
    Looking forward to more thoughts on this (which might find their way into documentation at one point also)
5

@PLIDS Did you figure out how to clone the Tag Field as per this post ? I want to create another Tag Type field or a list field that I can import too that does not require that the list item is already created and will create a new entry upon import …

6

Thank you for your response. I am not a programmer so have a hard time understanding some of this, however I have a programmer I am working with and if we find out a solution to this, I am of course going to be sharing with the community and hopefully we can even request a Github pull. Let me explain the scenario below to you and why this is so important in marketing and something Mautic should have…

I am in the process of mass harvesting data on Twitter at the moment. We are scraping all the “Retweeted” posts that a User will do with the Company Name of the Person they Retweeted and the Twitter Profile Handle. We are trying to do research using this data. I want to import this data to the unique field “Company Name” which is the entity doing the Retweets… So lets say I have a list of 500 Twitter Usernames and I want to do an import … I will put the Unique field in Column A on a spreadsheet of The Retweeter and then in Column B I will put all the Twitter Profile names of all the people they Retweeted on… The problem is that everytime I upload the data in a “Select-Multiple” field type, it will just overwrite on the merge so only the new fields will show (and yes I am using the logic A|B|C when importing). … And I thought I could get around this with tags, but it appears that Tags have to be manually selected upon import and cannot be imported from large excel files… I am currently doing research on the Marketplace plugin called Contact Ledger History - technically we could write code after an import and use the history of changes to update it on the backend, but I feel there must be a better way…

7

Hi,
Multiselect custom fields are stored in the DB pipe separated:
“value1|value2|value3”

If you have “value1” and you want to add to it, read it out via API and post back the updated value: “value1|value2”.

PS: Before you invest more time in a plugin always make sure if it’s compatible with your current version and if it is maintaned well enough.

Joey

8

I appreciate this response and will be testing with my developer, I will be sure to share the outcome after we experiment with it. Thank you ~ J

9

Custom field.