Best practices to clean up models (especially Actions)

Hi everyone,

Trying to get some ideas and best practices from this great community on how to clean up unused fields in Actions.

I recently deleted some line items that I was no longer using. There was nothing in the "Reference by" column so it made sense.

But they were linked to some Actions to Spoke models and I ended up breaking those accidentally. I went through every action in the spoke and made sure I couldn't see this field. So now everything works. But it took me a long time and some rework to ensure I captured every spot.

Any tips and tricks to make this process go faster and ensure I capture everything? What best practices do you have to clean up your models?

Thanks!

Accepted answers

SriNitya

While creating the line items mention its purpose where it is used either in filters/Actions/DCA this helps in cleaning the model.

https://community.anaplan.com/discussion/56066/oeg-best-practice-best-practices-for-model-cleanup-in-anaplan

All comments

SriNitya

While creating the line items mention its purpose where it is used either in filters/Actions/DCA this helps in cleaning the model.

https://community.anaplan.com/discussion/56066/oeg-best-practice-best-practices-for-model-cleanup-in-anaplan

Dikshant

Deepakk, it depends on how the model was built in the first place. If it is following DISCO principles, a lot of things would be quite auditable in the first place. Like all your data modules and calc modules are clubbed together, this gives a model good visibility.

The first thing every modeler does in order to do model cleanup is find line items with no references. Post this as you have realized now that figuring out if it's being used in any action or as a saved view filter is important. This task is unfortunately a manual one for now. You can copy paste all import action details into excel and search the module that line item belongs to in the source object and then check if this module is used as a source to some other module or not.

For a longer run, documenting all inbounds and outbounds, source views and target modules and what all columns we are importing or exporting, would give a better visibility while doing model cleanup again.

DeepakK

Thanks @SriNitya and @Dikshant.

These are helpful comments and the article is a good one.

seymatas1

Before deleting a line item, make sure to check the UX page filters, too.

This task is suitable for a junior model builder who is trying to learn a small, relatively uncomplicated model, especially if the notes section wasn't used during development.

Here's the task:

Review Saved View Filters: Identify line items used as filters. Document these details in the Notes section for the line items.
Check All Actions: Apply the same review process and note-taking for actions.
Review UX Pages: Repeat this process for all UX pages.

I highly recommend reading the article Using Model Notes in Anaplan by @hsich1020.

hsich1020

Correct. I use Data tags for this purpose.

Make a list of UX pages suitable for adding to Data Tags. As Modules are used in a UX page, note the UX page in Data Tags for easy review in model clean up

Dikshant

@hsich1020 - Can you share more insights on data tags ?

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