Quick way to find unused tags?

Ignition
1

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…

thanks in advance…

2 Likes
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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…

1 Like
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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.

BadTags.proj (9.6 KB)

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Sorry, I read your post a little closer, this probably won’t do what you are looking for. But, it’s there if you need it.

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How crazy an idea would it be to have a last read timestamp property on tags?

4 Likes
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Excluding reads by Gateway status browse and Designer Tag panel browsing

1 Like
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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.

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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.

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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: