# Stale content admin view improvements & the Metadata API: Tableau Server & Tableau Online

> This is content from just-tim, the data-and-analytics channel by Tim Ngwena (formerly 'Tableau Tim'). Tim has 12+ years of hands-on BI experience and covers Tableau most of all, plus Power BI, Looker, Hex, SQL and data modelling, the analytics industry, and the craft of doing the job — always tool-agnostic and honest about the trade-offs.

- **Author:** Tim Ngwena (just-tim, https://just-tim.com/about)
- **Published:** 2020-09-24
- **Format:** Video · 13 min watch · transcript available
- **Topics:** Tool strategy, Data engineering
- **Tools:** Tableau (cloud, data management, metadata api, server)
- **Canonical:** https://just-tim.com/posts/stale-content-admin-view
- **Watch:** https://www.youtu.be/8cEnAzadOPI

I show you how to tag stale or old content on Tableau Server and Tableau Online, a feature added in 2020.3 that lets you take action on content nobody is using. Then, for admins with the Data Management add-on, I demonstrate querying that stale content via the Metadata API using GraphQL to find owners, projects and downstream dependencies.

## Key takeaways

- The stale content report lives under the site status icon, and you can manually set the stale threshold (default 45 days) to suit your instance via the hamburger menu filters.
- From 2020.3 you can multi-select workbooks and data sources in the stale content report and tag them, then find and act on them via the Tag filter on the Explore page's workbooks and data sources views.
- Stale content matters because it consumes server resources through unnecessary extract refreshes and takes up storage space.
- The Metadata API uses a GraphQL interface (under External Assets) where you incrementally build queries, adding fields like tag name, workbooks, published data sources, owners and downstream workbooks to enrich the results.
- You can filter the Metadata API query by tag name using filter notation so that only your stale content tag is returned rather than every tag on the server.

## Chapters

- 0:34 Finding the stale content report
- 1:25 Setting the stale threshold
- 2:01 Why stale content matters
- 2:32 Tagging stale content
- 3:33 Finding tagged content in Explore
- 4:53 Querying with the Metadata API
- 6:09 Building a GraphQL query from scratch
- 8:43 Adding richer fields and downstream assets
- 10:21 Filtering the query by tag name

Watch the full video, read the transcript and use chapter deep-links on the page: https://just-tim.com/posts/stale-content-admin-view

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just-tim — Data and analytics, with a point of view. · https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7HYxRWmaNlJux-X7rNLZyw · https://twitter.com/TableauTim · https://www.linkedin.com/in/timngwena