Tags with hierarchical value (kind of priority)

Question

I have some rules that applies to user.

I wonder if a solution base on tags could be right.

For example I have one user tagged: Manager, Computer scientist

And I want to allow managers to buy for 2000$ and Computer scientists 1000$.

Because the user is tagged with both, I want to give to the manager tag a hierchical position 2 and computer scientist 1, and apply the rules with the higher hierarchical position.

Can it be a good and an easy understandable solution ?

Answer 1

Conceptually you would sequence the complete set of tags, and the tags earlier in the sequence would have priority over the later tags. It would also be a good idea to maintain that order anytime the tags (all of them or a subset) are displayed so people get an idea of which tags have the higher priority - people would know their first listed tag is their highest priority tag.

Using your example "Computer Scientist" would come before "Manager" in the sequence.

I say "conceptually" sequence them because I'm not sure exactly how you would want to implement this, possibly an array, or a hash, or a JavaScript object. It can be implemented in many ways as long as you can get the answer to "which of these 2 tags comes first?"

And I think a better word to describe what you want is "priority" not "hierarchy".