Tags
This feature is currently in development and will be available soon.
Introduction
Tags help you efficiently categorize the 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 are 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
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 thetags.aml
file located in the Development workspace, under thesettings
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.
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.- 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 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".

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.