COMSOL 6.3 - Assigning Tags to Items

Assigning Tags to Items

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 hierarchical 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 data files in the database by searching on their assigned tags — either by matching textually on tag titles via Full Text Search or by applying a Tag filter on the unique keys of tags. You can even find models and data files by searching on ancestor tags — that is, tags assigned to the items’ tags themselves. For example, if you create an Interpolation Functions tag and assign it a My Project parent tag, you may assign the former tag to data files and then find those same data files by filtering on the latter tag.

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

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Tag assignments are version controlled. A new commit is saved on the branch whenever you add or remove assigned tags for 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 updated tag assignments from The Revert Window.

You can search items based on their tag assignments as they were at a particular time. Perhaps you want to find all items that were assigned a tag, say In Progress, a month ago, or merely see what the tag tree looked like — see The Tag Tree for details.

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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. 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 checkbox 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 checkbox 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.

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 tree nodes in an hierarchical tree structure. Items assigned a particular tag appear as child nodes to the tag node in tree. You can find a particular item in multiple positions in the tree as items can be assigned more than one tag. You can think of items not assigned any tags at all as placed under a hidden root tag.


	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.

You can browse the tag tree in The Databases Window if you have selected in the menu (

) or in the The Model Manager Window if you have selected the button (

). Expanding a branch tree node in the former window or searching a branch in the latter window shows the tag assignments at present time — see also Searching in Branches. To browse the tag assignments at some point in the past:

Right-click one of your branches under the node (

) in the window and select (

In the opened window, right-click one of the commits in the table and select (

The Tree View in the window is updated to show the tag assignments as they were at the time the commit was saved.

If you have created a snapshot to record a specific commit, you can expand its tree node in the window to see the tag tree at the time the recorded commit was saved — see also Searching in Snapshots and Commits.

Assigning Tags

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.

Guidelines on Tag Tree Setup

Model Manager will neither prevent you from creating tags having multiple parent tags, nor will it prevent you from creating tags having the same title. While this gives you complete freedom in setting up your tag tree, there are some pros and cons that should be weighed.

Assigning more than one parent tag to a tag enables you to have multiple organizational subtrees with overlapping contents. You can, for example, have a main subtree used to uniquely categorize all your models and data files based on characteristics — much like files in folders on the file system. The tag layout in that subtree, once created, would seldom change. You can then have various other subtrees used to organize projects in which you want to work with whole collections of models and data files from the main subtree — rather than assigning the project tag to all those items directly, you assign it to some of the items’ assigned tags. This requires some discipline, though, to not end up with a tag tree that is hard to navigate.

By creating multiple tags with the same title, you can organizationally separate different collections of models and data files in the tag tree while still labeling these items using a common concept. This enables you, and your coworkers, to easily find the items when searching on the tag title, without making it difficult to browse them when navigating the tag tree. Having the same title for different tags will make it harder, though, to quickly identify where in the tag tree a specific item is located when viewing it in a result table or list. Moreover, you must now remember to select all of them when applying a corresponding filter for the common concept represented by the tags.