Organizing projects with tags & suites
Group related projects under a suite (a “master project”), label them with cross-cutting tags, then search, sort, filter, and group the Projects grid — and change many projects at once with bulk edit.
Last updated 2026-07-16
Once you've imported more than a handful of projects, the grid gets busy. AppRelay gives you two ways to cut through it: suites, which group related projects under one master project, and tags, which are free-form labels you can filter by. They're complementary — a project belongs to one suite but can carry many tags.
Suites
A suite is a named, colored group with an icon — typically one product's family of repos. If you ship a web domain, a macOS app, and an Android app that all belong to the same product, you'd put all three under one suite and see them as a single block in the grid.
Creating one
Three routes, all reaching the same editor:
- A project card's ⋯ menu (or right-click) → New suite… — creates it and assigns that project in one step.
- Project Settings… → the Organization card → the Master project picker → New suite…
- The Suites chip above the grid → Manage suites… → New suite.
The editor takes a Name, a Color (ten presets, or Custom for a #RRGGBB value), and an icon, with a live preview of the badge as you go.
Assigning and unassigning
The fastest way is the card's ⋯ menu, which lists every suite by name with a checkmark beside the current one, plus No master project to pull it back out. The same picker lives in Project Settings → Organization.
Managing them
Manage Suites lists every suite with its icon, name, and how many projects it holds. You can reorder them with the arrows — that order drives the section order in the grouped grid — edit, or delete.
Tags
Tags are cross-cutting labels: ios, backend, client-work. Unlike suites they aren't exclusive, so they're the right tool for anything that cuts across products.
Where to add them
- One project
- Project Settings… → the Organization card → Tags. Type into the field and press Return or , to commit each one; existing tags show as chips you can remove.
- Many projects at once
- Manage… → select the projects → Bulk Edit → the Tags card. See Bulk editing.
There's no tag control on the project card itself — the card's ⋯ menu only handles suite assignment.
How tags are normalized
AppRelay tidies tags as you add them, so the filter list doesn't fill up with near-duplicates:
| Rule | Effect |
|---|---|
| Lowercased | iOS and ios are the same tag |
| Trimmed | Stray spaces are dropped |
| Max 24 characters | Longer tags are truncated |
| Deduplicated | First one wins; order is preserved |
| Up to 12 per project | A hard cap, to keep them meaningful |
Finding things in the grid
The controls row appears above the Projects grid once you have more than one project:
- Search
- Free-text match on project names.
- Sort
- Manual order (the default — your drag order), Name (A–Z), Name (Z–A), or Toolchain.
- Filter
- Narrow to one toolchain. Lists only the toolchains actually present in your workspace.
- Tags
- Only appears once at least one project has a tag. Multi-select, and it matches on any selected tag rather than all of them — so picking
iosandandroidshows projects with either. The chip reads the tag name for one, or “N tags” for several. - Suites
- Filter to a single suite, or toggle Group by suite. Also where Manage suites… lives.
When something is filtering, the subtitle tells you so — “Showing X of Y projects.” If nothing matches you get No projects match and a Clear button rather than an empty void.
Grouping by suite
Turn on Group by suite and the grid splits into collapsible sections in the order you arranged in Manage Suites, with anything unassigned gathered under Ungrouped at the end. Only suites with a visible project get a section, so grouping composes with filtering instead of fighting it. Suite badges appear on cards only when you're not grouping — under a section header they'd just be repeating it.
Bulk editing
Manage… above the grid opens Manage Projects: tap projects to select them (or Select all / Select N samples), then Bulk Edit N projects….
Every card in the Bulk Edit sheet is opt-in via its own switch — only the fields you turn on are touched, so you can't clobber something you forgot was there:
- Master project
- Move every selected project into one suite, or ungroup them all.
- Tags
- Add (keeps existing), Remove (keeps the others), or Replace (sets exactly these — and clears all tags if you leave it empty).
- App icon
- Apply one image across the selection, or reset to auto-detection. Handy when sub-projects share a product icon.
- Toolchains
- Enable or Disable toolchains in bulk — this is what drives each project's Requirements checks.
- Version
- Write a version (and optional build) into every selected project's real version files.
Review & Apply shows a plain-English summary before anything happens — for example “Add tags: #ios #backend” or “Set version 2.4.1 → 3 lanes in 2 projects (1 skipped: no repo folder or version file)”. Version writes skip any lane whose repo folder or version file can't be resolved, and the summary tells you how many.
They travel with your workspace
Suites live on the workspace and tags live on the project, so both are part of your configuration rather than a view preference — they survive an export and import, and they show up on AppRelay Mobile, which has the same suite sections, tag filters, and bulk editing as the desktop.
Next steps
- Projects, repositories & the repo root — what else lives on a project
- The .relay archive — how your setup travels