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Stale Content Cleanup — Apply

stale-content-cleanup-apply

A guided, destructive Tableau Cloud admin workflow that identifies stale workbooks and published data sources, reports their owners to notify, and — only after explicit human approval — tags the approved items and deletes them to the recycle bin.

Admin Only · Destructive

This prompt is restricted to Tableau site administrators and requires the ADMIN_TOOLS_ENABLED environment variable. It drives destructive delete tools. The report, LUID-resolution, and notify steps are read-only: no content is written (tagged or deleted) until the user approves a specific item set at the required human-in-the-loop confirmation break.

Workflow​

The prompt sequences existing deterministic tools — it performs no calculations itself. Steps 1–3 are read-only; no write happens until after the Step 4 approval break:

  1. Report (read-only) — calls query-admin-insights with kind: "stale-content" once; uses its rows verbatim. If the report returns more than 100 rows, the workflow refuses to act on the whole batch and asks the user to narrow scope first.
  2. Resolve LUIDs (read-only) — the report emits a numeric itemId, not the LUID the delete tools need. Each item's LUID is resolved via list-workbooks / list-datasources filtered by name and project. Ambiguous matches are skipped, never guessed.
  3. Notify report (read-only) — builds an owner-notification table using the report's ownerEmail, falling back to list-users filtered by owner LUID (id:in:...) for any gaps. Report-only; no email is sent.
  4. Human confirmation break — presents the resolved items and owners and requires explicit approval before any tag or delete. In a dry run (the default) the workflow stops here, having written nothing.
  5. Tag approved items (reversible) — only for approved items, calls delete-content in preview mode (with the appropriate resourceType and minAgeDays). The server re-checks that each item is still stale and tags it with the date-stamped batch marker pending-deletion-YYYY-MM-DD (UTC); the workflow records the cleanupDate each preview reports. Items whose preview is rejected (no longer stale, or staleness unverified) are dropped. Nothing is deleted.
  6. Grace check — confirms the notification window has elapsed and the items are still the intended targets. Items the owner asked to keep are un-marked with delete-content (action: "remove-pending-tags"). Keep the grace window shorter than the server's batch age limit (PENDING_DELETION_MAX_AGE_DAYS, default 30 days) — a batch older than that can no longer be confirmed and must be re-previewed.
  7. Delete (confirmed) — only for approved items, calls the delete tool with confirm: true, the recorded cleanupDate, and the same minAgeDays. The tool re-fetches each item, deletes only if it carries that batch's marker, and re-checks staleness first — an untagged item, an item tagged for a different batch, an item used since the batch, or a batch older than the age limit is rejected server-side and not retried. Deleted content goes to the Tableau recycle bin (recoverable for a limited time).
  8. Clear residue — lists the batch's tagged items with list-workbooks / list-datasources (tags:eq:pending-deletion-<cleanupDate>) and removes any markers left on items that were not deleted with delete-content (action: "remove-pending-tags").

A pending-deletion tag authorizes only its own cleanup batch, only until the batch is older than the age limit, and every delete re-checks staleness — an old or legacy tag can never silently authorize a deletion.

Arguments​

ArgumentTypeRequiredDescription
minAgeDaysstring (integer)NoMinimum days since last access for content to be considered stale. Defaults to the server-configured threshold (default 90).
projectIdsstringNoComma-separated project LUIDs to scope the cleanup to.
itemTypesstringNoComma-separated subset of content types to clean up (Workbook, Datasource). Defaults to all supported types.
dryRun"true" | "false"NoWhen true (default), stops at the confirmation break after the read-only report and notify steps — writing nothing (no tag, no delete). A safe rehearsal. Set to false to allow tagging and the confirmed-delete phase after approval.

Extensibility​

The prompt is parameterized over a content-type registry mapping each itemType to its list and delete tools. Supporting a new content type is a matter of adding a registry entry plus its delete tool — the workflow text adapts automatically.

Configuration​

ADMIN_TOOLS_ENABLED=true

# Optional overrides (env vars)
STALE_CONTENT_MIN_AGE_DAYS=90   # 1-3650; default 90
STALE_CONTENT_MAX_ROWS=100      # 1-10000; default 100

See also: Environment Variables