CollectionService Tag category for properties widget

As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to tag instances as both a programmer and a non-programmer, and to see which instances in my game are tagged.

Roblox Studio lacks a native way to add and view tags on instances, and developers currently have to use plugins to this end. This means instead of looking in one place to see tags and properties, they have to remember to check their plugin to see if an instance has the correct tags.

I would expect this to be another property category at the bottom of the list in the properties widget. I would expect to be able to do the following:

  • See all tags on the instance.
  • Add new tags to the instance.
  • Remove tags from the instance.

Nice to haves:

  • Copy and paste tags between instances (and attributes, and other properties too).

CollectionService is an incredibly powerful tool, but it is completely invisible to developers until they find it by chance digging through the forum or development resources. If Roblox is able to address this issue, CollectionService would be far more discoverable and easier to use, without having to rely on third-party plugins that are not immediately accessible.


Related topic: Make the Tag Editor a Built-in Plugin
Created this new one to expand better upon needs, rather than just asking for a third-party plugin to be dropped directly into Studio.

37 Likes

This would be extremely useful to me. I use CollectionService all the time, but it’s hard to know what things are tagged without using the tag editor plugin (which I have found to be a bit buggy and hard to use). I didn’t discover CollectionService until about 2 years after I started coding on Roblox, and I’m sure many others still don’t know about it. Adding it to Properties would both make CollectionService more discoverable to anyone who doesn’t know about it and would make it easier to use.

4 Likes

As someone who tutors people on Roblox Lua, CollectionService is one of the first things I cover. However, having clients download the tag editor plugin makes it seem like CollectionService is some external library that we’re importing. Adding support for tags to the properties window would help my workflow and their workflows immensely.

8 Likes

Here’s an alternate design with tabs I was kicking around earlier this evening; could possibly be a more intuitive/clean way of organising things:

image

Whatever ends up being implemented tho is much better than what we have now (which is nothing).

22 Likes

This is really nice I love it!

I have a few suggestions in regards to how the feature should be.

Additionally the Tag Editor plugin does a lot more than just adding tags so I don’t know if Roblox will be able to replace it with something better if not equal.

We should have a toggle-able option to display these additional tabs.

Because UIs takes additional resources and SOME developers don’t need to see them and / or doesn’t have a good enough computer (even with a good computer I really doubt that it will help in any way)

What do I mean by this?

Well, I have been doing experiments and found out that we can have nearly infinite amounts of Tags and Attributes (with equal amounts of memory) in pure code which doesn’t hinder performance but when you try to display it on a UI it will almost crash your computer.

So why should this be considered?

Some people don’t need to use the Tags and Attributes, and or might have a low spec computer.

Being able to not display this will theoretically help with performance and workflow.

Thanks for the support, but I don’t understand what exactly you’re trying to say?

I’m not sure how turning off those tabs would help people on lower end computers. With tabs, the only UI elements you need to create are for the contents of the current tab, which would theoretically improve performance on lower end hardware. Turning off the tabs would require all UI elements to be made upfront, which would be bad for performance.

You could say the same thing for basically anything in Studio - if I try and edit a model with 10 million children, Studio would probably freeze up. While great performance under extreme load is a desirable goal, it doesn’t realistically reflect what 99.9% of developers deal with in Studio, so I don’t think crashing with a million tags on an object should be considered a failure.

Perhaps I’m not understanding correctly, but hopefully the above makes sense!

2 Likes

This feature is not meant to be a 1:1 drop-in of the tag editor. This is simply bare minimum support for tags in the properties widget. You can see this feature request about a major widget meant to cover organization of tags, attributes, and property arrangements, which covers the rest of the use-cases the tag editor plugin does.


Sorry, but this is nonsense. Studio should be able to performantly show everything within reason (e.g. by not loading everything until you scroll down), or developers should be more reasonable.