Visual Task Board unlimited labels [New York]

[Mark Roethof]

Hi there,

A common question on the community is how to create a new label on the Visual Task Board. Up to London, there were 5 labels, with Madrid 7 labels. Though what if you have a need to have more labels? No go… until New York 🙂

Pre-New York

This is how it looks like pre-New York:

As you can see, no option for an additional label.
These labels are actually controlled through the vtb_card table, with fields like label_1, label_2, etc.. Unfortunately, we are not able to extend this. It's just not like just adding u_label_8 or something. Just not possible, we also can't access the code for the $vtb.do page.

With New York

This is how it looks like with New York:

As you can see, seven default labels are shown, and you have the possibility to add your custom labels. Theoretically: unlimited!
These labels aren't controlled anymore through the Visual Task Board Cards table (vtb_card) (you will still see the fields on that table, though they aren't used anymore: deprecated may be a nice word for it. The labels are now controlled through the VTB Board Labels tabel (which holds the actual labels, and this way theoretically unlimited) and Label Entries tabel (which holds the relationship between the card and the label).

Scripting labels

I've seen some community threads about automating the labels, we also looked at that ourselves for our VTB. Be aware: with New York any scripting on the Visual Task Board Cards tabel label fields will not work anymore! As mentioned the label_1, label_2, etc. fields aren't used anymore. If there's a desire for automating the labels, you would need to look at the VTB Board Labels tabel (vtb_board_label) (which holds the actual labels) and the Label Entries tabel (label_entry) (which holds the relationship between the card and the label).

Here's how the relation looks like.

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And that's it actually. Not much to it. Have fun with the unlimited labels 🙂

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Kind regards,
Mark

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LinkedIn

[Thom12]

Mark, as you pointed out in Scripted Visual Task Board Card labels [New York], VTB labels "are now stored in the Tag table".  Are the tags created for VTB labels always Global? More specifically, is there a way to make them Shared instead? 

[Mark Roethof]

Hi Thom,

Nice question!
If you would add a Label manually thru the Labels list on your VTB, it will just be available on that specific VTB. Though, because that label is stored in the Tags [label] table, you could go to the VTB Board Labels [vtb_board_label] table, and simply create a new record for an other board (if done manually, only boards you own or are member of are accepted).

So the Labels could be used on multiple VTB's. Though automatically global? They are for sure not. Would be achievable thru scripting I guess. If I look for example at out-of-the-box "High Priority" label, this is how it looks like if you are using several VTB's:

Kind regards,
Mark

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LinkedIn
Community article list

[krr]

The VTB labels are all created as global tags and are automatically use the same global tag on a other VTBs if you type the same name for a tag.

This allows you to have pre-made global tags that can be added by users or scripted to be added to a VTB.

The main drawback in my view is that users can't create VTB labels without having access to create global tags. Additionally the user that created the tag originally becomes the Owner of the tag and renaming a tag will create a new global tag.

Per the Configure Visual Task Boards labels documentation a user needs the global_tags_creator role to make or rename a label.

I also looked through the script includes and you can create the below system property to bypass the need for the role, but it still creates global tags.

Name: glide.vtb.check_global_tags_creator_role
Type: true | false
Value: false

[Adam Hunley]

My company is struggling with this implementation of global tags for the labels on VTB boards.  If we give this ability to our scrum masters, we will get lots of global tags created that could have wide overlap of names.  They could create "high priority", "High Priority", "HP", "HIGH", etc.  All these tags would then show up for other records to use as tags in the system other than VTB boards.

If we only create a standard set of labels, the scrum masters can't create dynamic labels as the need arises for different development work that they do. 

It would be great if the labels of a VTB board only existed for that board but could also still use global tags for the labels.  That way you could have a standard set of labels available to everyone and the ability to create custom labels per board.

[chuckn]

Agreed.  Letting people create global tags muddies that up for everyone.