topic Re: Faster way to remove orphan fields from data model in App Development

Faster way to remove orphan fields from data model

Aditya_Chitale — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 11:46:08 GMT

Hello Everyone,

I am working with a large Qlik sense data model where we have huge number of orphan fields which are not being used in frontend charts as well as not used anywhere for linking of tables or calculations in the load script.

I want to remove those fields from the data model to improve performance. Since the number of such fields is very high, is there any faster way or any shortcut method to remove those fields ? I can't keep on removing the fields manually one by one as it is taking a lot of time.

Any help on this is highly appreciated.

Regards,

Aditya

Re: Faster way to remove orphan fields from data model

pablolabbe — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 20:15:49 GMT

QSDA Pro is a tool with this capability

Re: Faster way to remove orphan fields from data model

pablolabbe — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 20:15:19 GMT

And also this extension can help you too https://www.regarden.io/extensions/3170c06d-0cbb-462f-a3e6-5303f9763249

Re: Faster way to remove orphan fields from data model

Aditya_Chitale — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 05:10:51 GMT

@pablolabbe

I have already used the Qollect extension but cannot see option to auto remove orphan fields. Although it gives a list of used and unused fields.

I want to remove the un used fields from the load script but not manually.

Regards,

Aditya

Re: Faster way to remove orphan fields from data model

marcus_sommer — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 08:13:35 GMT

Such a list of fields might be used within a loop at the end of the scripts to drop these fields.

More automation is probably quite difficult because it would require to read all scripts within all layers and then adding appropriate drop-statements respectively much more preferable to avoid already their loading. A manipulating of the scripts from the outside is probably possible but surely not trivial. Be further aware that fields which have no usage within the UI might be used for any temporary calculations/matching within the ETL.

Therefore I doubt that there is a sensible way to apply an automation else more pragmatic would be to do it manually and this pain will be helpful to avoid such struggle in the next time by loading everything explicitly.

Re: Faster way to remove orphan fields from data model

HirisH_V7 — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 08:35:50 GMT

Hi you can check this

1. Schedule the Document Analyzer app to run after your main app reload.
2. Use its generated QVDs to identify unused fields.
3. Load the unused fields list into your app script.
4. Loop through the list and DROP FIELD each unused field dynamically.
5. Optionally, log dropped fields for governance tracking.

Below is snippet for ref.

UnusedFields: LOAD FieldName, AppName, 'Unused' as FieldStatus FROM [lib://Governance/DocumentAnalyzer_Fields.qvd] (qvd) WHERE [FieldState] = 'UNUSED' // This depends on your DA structure AND [AppName] = 'MyAppName'; FOR i = 0 TO NoOfRows('UnusedFields') - 1 LET vField = Peek('FieldName', $(i), 'UnusedFields'); TRACE Dropping unused field: $(vField); DROP FIELD [$(vField)] FROM *; NEXT i

Re: Faster way to remove orphan fields from data model

Aditya_Chitale — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 07:02:21 GMT

Hi @marcus_sommer , thanks for your reply. As I said, these fields are not being used anywhere in the data model. neither in any calculations nor in any key generation for table linking. these are completely orphan useless fields which are unnecessarily increasing the load time of the model.

Anyways, I guess I will have to do the removal manually since I cannot use a loop for dropping them as it would require them to load in the memory first. Thanks for the help anyways.

Regards,

Aditya

Re: Faster way to remove orphan fields from data model

Aditya_Chitale — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 07:06:18 GMT

@HirisH_V7 , I cannot use this approach as it would require the fields to load into memory first before dropping them. my purpose of removing these fields was to reduce loading time.

Regards,

Aditya

Re: Faster way to remove orphan fields from data model

HirisH_V7 — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 08:15:44 GMT

Best possible Solution would be doing a binary load for final app and doing the dropping at end of it. This way the current app reload time would be less and only required fields would be their in it.

Else, other work around would be to create a transformation layer with limited fields (which are inline with metadata extracted previously) loaded into QVD's. Then those QVD's sourced into main app.

As per you ask, some or other way we should get meta data of which fields are being used and not. Then only dropping or commenting can be done.

Re: Faster way to remove orphan fields from data model

marcus_sommer — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 09:42:12 GMT

You may try to reverse the above QSDA approach by evaluating the existing fields against the unused ones to get the necessary fields. These field-list could be then used to load from the data-base which means that all wanted fields are explicitly listed within the load/select-statement (which is a recommended best-practice approach).

Re: Faster way to remove orphan fields from data model

Or — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 11:22:28 GMT

Since you're not interested in just dropping the fields at the end of the script, I would say there's no good approach other than doing it manually. The fact that a field is orphaned at the end of the script doesn't mean it isn't doing something during the load process, meaning you'll have to evaluate each one by hand and confirm it can be safely removed. Otherwise, you could end up removing fields temporarily used for conditions, joins, etc. during the script load process.

Re: Faster way to remove orphan fields from data model

rwunderlich — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 18:40:25 GMT

Using the QSDA Pro script generator tool you can either generate a DROP FIELDS statement for unused fields or LOAD statements with commented fieldnames if you want to avoid loading the unused fields altogether.