Another dumb Q

To those who are about to read, my sincere apologies if my question is going to be confusing. The truth of it boils down to not knowing the thing I did wrong and what subject it would fall under, so all I can describe is a symptom I want to correct, and that means I have to give you a bit of a lengthy history to make sure I give enough info to get a answer. Likewise, going to the manual is frustrating as I don't know where to look.

When I first got RW prior to the big Nov update, as I was (am still?) quite clumsy in my use of the program, I created a set of global tags under the Archtype category. Back then this was called "Scope tags" I believe? Anyway, what I thought I was doing was making sure these Archtypes would be picked up as search tags if I ever entered the ATs in a snippet anywhere (which I believe is what global/scope tags are intended for yes?).

Moving forward several weeks, my realm has evolved a good bit and I've come to realize that my using ATs was neither elegant nor useful in the context of the system I was using. So I scrapped the ATs and reassigned them to classes. But I still have these AT's showing up in every article I create as tags, which my little OCD nugget brain keeps nagging at me to fix.

So today I tried to dive into that by thinking I would just delete the entries I put into the Archtype domain. Unfortunately, the X is greyed out and it says I can't delete this.

• So quick question on this, why can't i delete this?

Then I thought, I'll just clear all the "Shown" boxes, as that way it should no longer show those tags and rebuild the index to clear the tags from my many hundreds of articles I've created so far. Now RW is like my ex-wife, complaining I'm not doing it right

So what my question is if I entered items via a global scope and later on decided I didn't like how I had done it, how do I

• Modify a global/scope tag
• delete previous ones

Hopefully I asked that in a way that made sense

You can't delete a tag or tag domain as long as any of them are assigned. You're going to need to go through every topic and remove the tags. Then you can delete the tags and then the domain.

What would be useful here would be for RW to list the first - say - 20 topics preventing the waht-ever from being deleted.

You could then handle those 20 and try again, get the next 20, etc.

You can search for a particular tag and then systematically delete them from all the topics that come up.

If you know the tag you want to delete, filter on it. RW will show you only the topics/articles containing that tag.

It would work for tags.

(And thanks for the solution for that one.)

But if you have made a custom snippet in a custom category you want to get rid off it can be rather tiresome if you already filled that particular snippet here and there in your realm.

Hence the suggestion.

But you probably have some obvious solution for that as well

Thanks for the answers folks, I'm slowly cleaning up my realm as I go on with it. Just a little more time consuming than I'd prefer so naturally, it gets put on the back burner unless it happens to pop up

Vargr said:

But if you have made a custom snippet in a custom category you want to get rid off it can be rather tiresome if you already filled that particular snippet here and there in your realm.

Hence the suggestion.

But you probably have some obvious solution for that as well

Click to expand...

If you want to get rid of the custom category, then you obviously want to also get rid of the custom snippet. So there real objective here is to identify all the topics based on a particular category.

To do this, switch the nav pane to show all your topics grouped by category (via preferences). You'll see all the topics for the category you want to delete in a nice grouping. Convert those topics to the desired alternate category. Then you can delete the custom category you don't want anymore.

Once you're done, you can switch the preference back to show topics via the family groupings that is the default behavior.

Rob, I could be wrong, but I think Vargr's point was that if a user wants to delete a defined snippet from a Category Definition, he has to first delete every existing instance of that snippet in the World Almanac. Without some way to filter for the offending snippet, he's forced to potentially scroll through hundreds of topics to find however many instances of that snippet might exist.

What might be a nice alternative could be to have RW allow the user to delete a defined snippet from the Topic Category and have the system convert any preexisting instances into custom snippets.

Actually Dr Automaton is right.

It was the snippet I wanted to get rid of - sorry to be unclear on this point.

But I will remember the way to easily get rid of a custom category for possible later use.