The tagging widget doesn't check if the same term already exists [#1146744]

This problem occurs when a content type has multiple tagging fields using the same vocabulary. In such case, users can enter the same term in different fields which leads to non-unique tagging terms.

Comments

Comment #1

cluster4 CreditAttribution: cluster4 commented 4 May 2011 at 15:21

I'm not used to the patching workflow of drupal. So here comes some raw code that can be considered as a quick fix for the described problem.
In "taxonomy.module" jump to the taxonomy_field_presave() function and add the following code to the top of the foreach loop:

      $existing_terms = taxonomy_get_term_by_name($item['name']);
      if (!empty($existing_terms)) {
        $keys = array_keys($existing_terms);
    	$items[$delta]['tid'] = $keys[0];
    	continue;
      }

Comment #2

sun

German

Karlsruhe

CreditAttribution: sun commented 8 June 2011 at 01:09

Version:	7.0	» 8.x-dev
Priority:	Major	» Normal
Status:	Active	» Postponed (maintainer needs more info)
Issue tags:		+Needs backport to D7

We need a much more clear and concise problem description here. Including clean steps to reproduce.

Comment #3

mr.baileys

Dutch

🇧🇪 (Ghent)

CreditAttribution: mr.baileys commented 13 June 2011 at 12:34

Priority:	Normal	» Minor
Status:	Postponed (maintainer needs more info)	» Active

Confirmed this as a bug, steps to reproduce:

Create a vocabulary
Create a content type
Add an autocomplete taxonomy term reference field to the content type
Add another autocomplete taxonomy term reference field to the content type
Create a node for the content type, using the same term in both term reference fields

Expected outcome: term is created once, and both term reference fields reference that term.
Actual outcome: term is created twice, and both term reference fields refer to a separate term.

Reason seems to be that taxonomy_autocomplete_validate() uses taxonomy_term_load_multiple(), which caches the result. During the first iteration the term does not exist and is created, during the second iteration, taxonomy_term_load_multiple() still considers the term not to exist (cached), even though it was just created.

I can't really think of a valid use case for having 2 taxonomy reference fields (referencing the same vocabulary) on the same content type though, so downgrading this to a minor bug.

One solution might be to start using EntityFieldQuery to fetch the tids to load with taxonomy_term_load_multiple() instead of relying on the deprecated $conditions argument.

Comment #4

fangel CreditAttribution: fangel commented 2 August 2011 at 12:43

mr.baileys: Isn't the problem more that the exist-check is done by taxonomy_autocomplete_validate, but the term-creation is done by taxonomy_field_presave, not that the results from taxonomy_term_load_multiple is cached?

So first both autocomplete-fields are element-validated, which sets them as "need to be created", and when the field is then saved, no checking is done to see if the term exists, so both terms are created.