Is there a way to find tags that aren’t associated with a project any longer? We’ve removed defunct projects but we haven’t been very consistent with tag organization over the years. I’m now certain that we have a fair number of tags that are no longer associated with any project at all. I’d like to get rid of them but there’s no obvious way that I can see to ID orphaned tags…
While we probably should have some kind of tooling to aid this by now… we don’t.
Mostly because it’s difficult, if not impossible, to tell you with certainty a tag is no longer used because many times the only reference to a tag will be through a dynamic tag path either in scripting or as part of an expression in UDTs or bindings, etc…
Try this, it’s a template, v7.9.12. You can stick in a window, or just run as a template. It has worked for me. If you want to search all tags leave the filter blank. It can take a while depending on how many tags you have.
A tool like this would be great. I’ve imported tags from other projects but pulled way more tags than needed for what I am doing. Would be great to auto-clean tags that are unused.
That could be very difficult considering the existence of Driven Tag groups. Driven Tags can be scanned on-demand, so it's possible that a legitimate, used tag could have a value that hasn't been updated in days, weeks, months, etc. simply because the driving expression on its' group hasn't triggered a new read. There's no truly universal "rule" that a tag with data X period of time since last read is definitely bad.
Agreed; it would be up to the programmer to verify. Last read would provide more information than nothing. However, IA has given us a better tool for this now, so we're no longer comparing to nothing: