Features
Apply structured compound metadata to any item, image, document, or log — then paint it with colour-coded visual rules that make your inventory scannable at a glance.
Every inventory system has fields: name, location, purchase date, cost. But a home contains things that don't fit standard fields. An electrical component has a voltage rating. A paint tin has a finish type and a colour code. A tool has a manufacturer and a drive size. A piece of furniture has a wood species and a finish.
Casabeza's CTags system — compound tags — lets you attach exactly the metadata your items actually have, using structured key-value pairs you define, with no schema changes required.
A CTag is a compound key–value pair. The key uses a prefix:suffix structure that captures both category and attribute in a single field: material:body, material:screen, material:frame, voltage:input, voltage:output, finish:top, finish:edge.
This compound structure means a complex item — a piece of electronics, a piece of furniture, a vehicle component — can carry rich, specific metadata without key collisions or flat lists that lose their meaning. The prefix groups related attributes together. The suffix distinguishes them.
Simple key-value tags work too: voltage: 12v, finish: matte, status: needs-repair. The compound form is there when the item demands it.
CTags can be applied to:
Any entity can carry any number of tags. They are stored as structured data — queryable, filterable, and aggregatable across your entire inventory.
Tags become most useful when they're visually meaningful. Casabeza's paint system lets you define colour rules for any tag key — mapping specific values to specific colours.
Set a paint rule for voltage: 3.3v → orange, 5v → red, 12v → yellow. Now every item tagged with a voltage value displays that colour alongside the tag, making voltage ratings visible at a glance across a list of components without reading every value.
Paint rules apply at the key level (the key itself displays in a colour) and at the value level (individual values each get their own colour). A rule can be scoped to a specific tag target — the colour applied to an item record can differ from the colour applied on a log entry — or set as a catch-all that applies everywhere.
The tag index shows every key used in your home, the values present under each key, and how many items carry them. Navigate into a key to see all items grouped by value. Navigate into a specific value to see exactly which items have that combination.
CTags become a parallel navigation layer for your inventory. If you know something is a material:body: brass item but can't remember what it's called or where it's filed, the tag browser finds it directly.
The values you've used under a key are preserved and surfaced when adding tags to new items. The system remembers the vocabulary you've developed — every finish value, every voltage rating, every status label — so your tagging stays consistent without enforcing a rigid schema upfront.