tags not synced with nextcloud Notes's tags

[makayabou]

Expected behaviour

On my phone (Android), I use Nextcloud-Notes to edit my Nextcloud Notes (v0.17.0 , https://github.com/stefan-niedermann/nextcloud-notes. I can add tags to them.
On my computer, I use QOwnNotes to edit my Nextcloud Notes. I can add tags to them.
I would like that tags added with QownNotes appear in Nextcloud-Notes, and vice versa.

Actual behaviour

Tags created with nextcloud-notes don't show in QownNotes ; tags created with qownnotes don't show in nextcloud-notes

Steps to reproduce

Create a note with nextcloud-notes, add a tag, open the note in QoWnnotes. Tag don't appear.

Output from the debug section in the settings dialog

Relevant log output in the Log panel

Let me know if showing log would be useful.
Thanks a lot for your great work.

[pbek]

Thank you for your kind words, but sorry, I guess that will not work. If you have 1000+ notes you constantly would need to make 1000+ api calls to check for the tags (if there even is an api for it). I think that would never be performant... In theory you could play around with it by implement your own tagging with the help of http://docs.qownnotes.org/en/develop/scripting/README.html#notetagginghook. If you want to can report your explorations. ;)

[brainchild0]

@makayabou It appears that the Nextcloud notes app supports "categories", which is actually subdirectory, but does not support tags. Since tags are apparently in use and supported as a client-side feature for multiple clients of the Nextcloud notes app, lack of support for tags could be considered a design limitation in the notes app. Have you considered submitting a feature request to that project? The developers may have considered it redundant with categories, but if it is useful to the user base, they may want to know.

If it is implemented, it could be simply supported by the API using the "Get all notes" call, which returns to the client a list of notes and their attributes, which could be augmented to include a list of tags for each note (see Notes API 0.2). Support in QOwnNotes would be possible if, the developers are interested in adding it. Although it would require a few design changes in QOwnNotes to talk directly the the notes app, it would not require a separate request for each note to synchronize state.

[pbek]

it would not require a separate request for each note to synchronize state

I'd love syncing those tags, but imagine that happening for 1000s of notes 😆

[brainchild0]

Maybe I wasn't clear. Currently, the Nextcloud app does not support tags, so there is nothing you could do.

However, I tried to explain that if they ever did support tags, it would be very natural that the 1000s of requests you are imagining would not be necessary. All metadata from all notes is returned from a single request. Per-note requests would only occur when you need to submit a change to the metadata. Then each synchronization operation require one request per note that has changed on the client, not all notes.

You would have to scan the updated metadata against your own for changes, but as a local operation it would be cheap, even for a large note sets.

However, even in that case, you would be considering a design change where you talk directly to the note application, which I understand you do not do currently. You might consider this anyway, though, because then the functionality of notes synchronization would be available without the Nextcloud client, which currently needs to be configured separately on the same machine with coordinated configuration.

Synchronizing directly through the app would be a smoother user experience, if you are interested in doing it. But for now, that's just a suggestion, not the topic of the current issue.

[pbek]

There is http://docs.qownnotes.org/en/develop/scripting/README.html#notetagginghook to implement custom note tagging mechanisms, so everything could be done by that api (at least in theory) in the future.