Tagging Models and Files

You can assign Tags to your models and data files to help you with organizing them in the database. You can even assign tags to the tags themselves, thereby building a tree structure of tags — see The Tag Tree. In this regard, tags may remind you of folders on the file system. But tags go beyond that:

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You can find models and files by searching on their assigned tags. You can even find such items by searching on ancestor tags — that is, tags assigned to the item’s tags themselves. For example, if you create a tag Interpolation Functions and add it under the tag Project A, you may assign the former tag to data files and then find those data files by searching on the latter tag.

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You can assign multiple tags to a model, file, or even to a tag itself.

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The tag assignments are version controlled independently. A new commit is saved on the branch when you add or remove assigned tags to an item — see Adding and Removing Tag Assignments. This has the benefit that:

You can track changes to the assigned tags of items over time, giving you an organizational history. Perhaps you introduce tags for different stages in your modeling workflow, say In Progress, To Review, Approved, and Needs More Work.

You can revert any changed tag assignments from The Revert Window.

You can search items based on their tag assignments at a particular time by Searching in Snapshots and Commits. Perhaps you want to find all items that had a particular tag, say In Progress, a month ago, or merely see what the tag tree looked like. When Searching in Branches, you search the present tag assignments.

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The settings for tags are version controlled. If you change the title of a tag and click (

) in the window, a new version of the tag is created. Any tag assignments involving the saved tag will, however, be left unchanged.

Creating New Tags

Click (

) in the section of the toolbar to open the dialog box. The field shows the database, repository, and branch that the new tag will be created in.

In the tab, write the title for the new tag in the field.

Select the check box if you want the new tag to be automatically assigned to the current selection of model and files in The Model Manager Window or The Databases Window (depending on which window has focus). The check box is disabled if no models or files are selected.

In the tab, select tags in The Tag Tree that will be assigned to the new tag — in other words, its parent tags. Leaving all nodes in the tree cleared will create the new tag under the root. You can filter the tree of available parent tags by writing a tag title in the text field above the tree.

The tree is empty when you create your first tag.

In the field, write an optional comment for the associated commit.

Click to save the first version of the new tag in the database.

If a tag version is selected in The Model Manager Window or The Databases Window when you click (

), that tag will be initially selected as a parent tag in The Tag Tree in the dialog box.

You can see your new tag under the branch node in The Databases Tree if you have selected when clicking (

) in the window’s toolbar. You can also see it in the Tree View in The Model Manager Window as long as you have not written any search expressions in the search field or applied any filters.

The Tag Tree

Since tags can be assigned to other tags, items in a Model Manager database can be represented as nodes in a tree structure. Items assigned a particular tag appear as child nodes to the tag node. You can find a particular item in multiple positions in the tree as items can be assigned more than one tag. You may think of items not assigned any tags at all as placed under a hidden root tag. In The Databases Tree, such items appear as children under the nodes of Branches and Snapshots.


	To help you with identifying the regular model that a draft originated from, the draft node is placed as a child node to the regular model node in the tag tree, whenever both the model and draft share the same assigned tag. See also Item Save Types.

Assigning Tags to Items

To assign already created tags to an item, do one of the following:

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Select the item in The Model Manager Window or The Databases Window and click the button (

) in the section of the toolbar. You can select multiple models and files if you want to set the tag assignments of more than one item at once — see also Adding and Removing Tag Assignments.

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Set assigned tags from the section in the window of Items. Do not forget to click (

) in the window to save any changed tag assignments.

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Set assigned tags from the section in the window when saving a model version or in the window when exporting a file version — see also Saving Models to Databases and Exporting Output Directly to a Database.

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Select to import folders as tags when bulk importing files from the file system — see also Importing Files.

All four options sets the tag assignments via a commit. The second, third, and fourth option also save a new version of the item. The first option does not, which may be preferable as to not create unnecessary Save Conflicts if, for example, a model item happens to be simultaneously open in the COMSOL Desktop.