Adding Tags in Bulk

Info

This page is an overview of how to bulk tag fields and why you might want to do that. For more detailed information on creating, updating, and applying Tags manually start with this article - Tags

The Scenario

Your company just went through its first round of funding and has the first board meeting coming up. In preparation for that, the leadership team has asked you to create the key reports they need. You've spent hours building reports and dashboards for the leadership team and you've also spent a significant amount of time creating and updating fields that feed those reports. (Does anyone know how many fields you had to add... no, they just think the report data was there the entire time.... but that's for another day)

Now, you have all these new fields being leveraged in critical reports and you need to ensure no one changes them and you'd also like a way to view all these fields at once so that you and the rest of the Ops team can review these fields. 

This is a great opportunity to leverage Tags in Sonar. Tagging fields is a great way to help keep your team on the same page, give other users a way to find those fields, and add another layer of context to a specific field to ensure nothing gets jacked up. The good news is you can add Tags in bulk.

Adding Tags In Bulk

This video details how to tag fields in bulk.

If you'd prefer to read, the steps for bulk tagging have been listed below:

Now that we know we want to Tag all the fields that power our companies' board reports our first step will be to get the API names of all the fields you want to tag. As you're doing this be sure to keep track of the Object if the fields you want to tag are on different objects in Salesforce. Finally, API names are case-sensitive

Once you have the API names we can tag them using the Bulk Tag function. If you haven't done so yet, you should first create a tag you want to use then continue. You can create a Tag in the tags manager (Tags > Configure). Check this article for more details - here.

Using the quick find in Sonar, open the Object where the fields that will be tagged are. On the Object card, click on Bulk Tag. 

Within the bulk tag section, paste the API names of the fields you want to tag. Once you've added the API names click on Check Fields. This will either show a green check, indicating everything is good, or a red error with the specific field that needs to be corrected. Once you've confirmed the field API names are good, select the specific tag from the dropdown then click Bulk Tag:

Repeat the process above if the fields are on different objects. 

Where to View Tags In Sonar

As detailed in the video, adding tags in Sonar is a great way to quickly give your team an additional layer of context specifically for that field or a group of fields. That "context" will show in the form of a Tag when a specific field is viewed or when a user views a Specific Tag.

At a high level, it's also a great way to document or categories all the specific fields that relate to something specific. In the example above, after you've tagged all fields related to the "Board Reports" your team can view that Tag and see exactly which fields are feeding those reports, what other dependencies all those fields have and it will save your team time by providing a place to start if something needs to be updated or fixed. 

View tags from a field:

View tags from the home page: