Data Tags as a comment feature for developers

KirillKuznetsov

Hi team,

 

As a Model Builder and BAU Support Team Specialist, I am interested in documenting enhancements in our models. 

Using only the Notes feature as a commenting tool, it is getting really hard to track them all after a couple of years of the model being rolled out.

At some level of complexity of the model, it is getting essential to have a smart tool to search through all Change Tasks (implementation rounds) related to a particular entity of Anaplan (module, line item, property, list or action, etc.) as well as to see all entities related to a particular implementation round. Using the Revision Tags' Comparison feature, we can analyze what was made on a particular implementation round. But to aggregate the opposite way, first I tried to use the Data Tags feature as intuitively I felt this will be the perfect way I would use it!

 

Unfortunately, I was disappointed as in the result of your search it shows only some particular kind of data: list elements, which is not very useful for Builders and not even accessible for end-users as it is included in the Settings tab used by admins only.

 

I can see some potential in the Data Tags feature.
In the documentation for data tags, it says that it can be used with most of the entities in Anaplan. But trying to test it out I stuck with Find -> Data Tag Search Results for all possible cases it worked only for searching Lists and only from the data side.

I think this could be modified in the future to cover more options. Like reviewing a list of line items and properties grouped under one Data Tag or other kinds of technical sides. 

In programming practice, this is called "comment" and always used for a quick search through all of the entities you or your team have modified in some build or to see all implementation rounds a single entity was used at. Wikipedia says: 

"In computer programming, a comment is a programmer-readable explanation or annotation in the source code of a computer program. They are added with the purpose of making the source code easier for humans to understand, and are generally ignored by compilers and interpreters."

 

I think it will help builders a lot to keep track of what was changed, when, and who did it with any entity we have. I see this as great potential in upcoming updated functionality for builders.

 

Cheers,

Kirill Kuznetsov