A handy tool for tag management
Tags are a required field for all ArcGIS Online items. When adding a new item, you must include a tag. Recently I blogged about how to use tags effectively- they can be a powerful way to find things you want quickly and easily.
There's a number of changes and new capabilities coming up on the horizon that will make tags even more powerful to use. One of the things I have often wanted to do is to be able to globally search for and replace tags that I've used, for example look for misspellings, or just change or add tags in batch mode. And as an organization Administrator I've often wanted to do the same across my entire organization. While these capabilities aren't yet implemented in ArcGIS Online, there's a tool authored and maintained by one of my colleagues - John Grayson of the Applications Prototype Lab - that provides additional tag management capabilities that I find useful, and perhaps you will too.
John shares his work on GitHub and that's where you will find his ItemInfo repo, which provides some really useful tag management capabilities. It's just been updated to enable an Administrator to find all tags in the organization and replace or delete any of them. The app is published and maintained from Esri servers where you can launch ItemInfo directly. Here's a quick rundown of one example of how I use it to search for and replace tags.
(1) Spark up the app by launching it from it's hosted location.
(2) Login
(3) Click Tags to view all your tags. If logged in as an org Administrator, you will see all tags used in your organization.
(4) Locate the tag you want to change in the list and select it. In this case I found the misspelled "resilient commuitites" in the list of tags that I have used.
(5) Items that use the selected tag will be displayed. Click the tag you want to change, and choose replace tag.
(6) Enter the new tag, and choose Replace.
The replacement or deletion happens on all selected items that you own, or if an Administrator, on all selected items owned by members of your organization.
Some Caveats
A few things to keep in mind if you choose to use ItemInfo:
- The code is not supported, so use at your own risk. You may find curious things...
- The app is hosted on a single demo server, which may go up, down, or sideways unexpectedly at any moment.
- For organizations with very large numbers of users, when searching for tags as an Admin the app maybe slow, or may time-out.
- The app is subject to change at any moment, and the tag management part may soon be pulled out separately. I'll try to keep you posted...