Tags

Introduction

Tags help you efficiently categorize analytics content, allowing users to quickly discover related items through meaningful categories and labels.

High-level concept

Tags are a type of object metadata that helps organize and categorize your analytics content. Tags can be applied to data models, datasets, and dashboards.

Key characteristics:

• Unique name: Each tag name must be unique and is case insensitive. Renaming a tag to an existing name will merge these two tags.
• Nested structure: You can create nested tags up to one level deep (e.g., status/done).
• Enrich details: You can make your tags more meaningful and visually distinctive by adding descriptions and colors.

How-to

important

Changes are only fully applied after they are published to production.

Create tags

You can create tags in two ways:

• Centralized in tags.aml: Create and manage tags in the tags.aml file located in the Development workspace, under the settings folder. You can modify that file using either the Visual editor or Code editor. Using this file, you can:
  • Create, view, edit, and delete tags
  • Manage all data models, datasets, and dashboards associated with a specific tag
• Directly on objects: Create tags on-the-fly by adding them directly to objects without pre-defining them.

important

• tags.aml file is not created by default. You can create it manually, or it will be auto-generated when you add your first tag.
• If you delete the tags.aml, all tags will become ad hoc tags.
• To ensure changes propagate across all linked files, always use the Visual Editor when updating tags. Updates made through the Code Editor will not automatically apply to related files.

Add tags to an item

Tags can be assigned to (or removed from) items in both environments:

• In Development: You can either assign existing tags to an item, or create a new one.
• In Reporting: You can only assign existing tags to an item.

Any user with edit permissions on a specific item can assign and remove tags from that item.

Supported objects

• Data model
• Dataset
• Dashboard
• Widget (to be supported)
• Field (to be supported)

Syntax

tags.aml file

// Create a new tag in tags.aml
Tag {
    name: 'Sales'   
    description: 'Relates to Sales team.' // Optional
    color: '#C53BFF7'  // Optional
}

Tag {
    name: 'status/WIP' // Nested tag is supported   
    description: "Don't use these items." // Use double quote if the content includes quote marks.
}

Object’s file (e.g., dashboard.page.aml)

// Add a tag to a data model
@tag('marketing', 'high-level metrics')
Model facebook_ads {
  type: 'table'
  label: 'Facebook Ads Data'
  description: ''
  data_source_name: ''
}

// Add a tag to a dashboard
@tag('status/WIP', 'verified')
Dashboard ecommerce {
    block v1: VizBlock {
    }
}

Special cases

Ad hoc tags

Ad hoc tags are tags created directly on an item, using the Code Editor. These tags are visible in the Visual Editor but not available in the code file of the tags.aml file. They display with a dashed border to visually distinguish them from normal tags.

Once you add metadata (color, description) to these tags, they will be auto-added to tags.aml and become a normal tag.

Merging tags

You can merge two existing tags by renaming one tag to match another in the tags.aml file. This is useful when you have duplicate or similar tags that should be consolidated.

After merging:

• All items previously tagged with tag A are auto-reassigned to tag B
• The merged tag retains all metadata and characteristics of the original tag B
• Tag A is removed from the system

For example, if you rename “Marketing Dept” to “Marketing,” all dashboards and datasets tagged with “Marketing Dept” will automatically be retagged as “Marketing".

info

Renaming special tags like Endorsed or Archived can have an extra effect. For details, refer to:

• Rename an endorsed tag
• Rename an archive tag

Tags of extended items

When you extend an item from a master item using AML Extend, the extended item automatically inherits all tags from its master. However, if you add new tags directly to the extended item using code, these new tags will override the inherited tags.

For example, imagine you have a master dashboard called “Original Ecommerce” with two tags status/WIP and high-level metrics .

When you create an extended dashboard named “Extend Ecommerce” from “Original Ecommerce”, it will initially inherit these two tags:

But, if you then add a new tag, dept/Sales, directly to the “Extend Ecommerce” dashboard, it will only have the dept/Sales tag. The inherited tags (status/WIP and high-level metrics) will be replaced.

FAQs

1. We’re on version 3.0. How can we use Tags and Endorsement features?

Tagging System is available exclusively on Holistics version 4.0. Please ensure you are using this version.

If not, you can migrate your Holistics instance to version 4.0.