Finding all assets displaying a metadata field

[Douglas]

Matrix Version: 5.4.1.2

The question of finding all assets displaying a metadata field came up in discussion on Friday morning.

We largely output metadata fields via paint layouts, but there isn’t a painless way I could immediately think of to quickly find all layouts including a metadata field in content strings within _admin. By painless I mean one that wouldn’t require a lot of manual note taking to record paint layouts on assets, then checking each layout manually - and checking things like conditional checks as well.

File system greps are another matter of course but require knowledge of where paint layouts and designs get cached(?) in the file system.

Are there any methods the forums could suggest?

[Bart]

This would probably be impossible to find out because the PL itself doesn’t have any association with the metadata schema or field itself, it doesn’t know anything about it. All it knows is what the data the asset has that it’s printing. What is the reason to find this out anyway? Wouldn’t it be better to look at the Usage screen of a Metadata Schema to find out all assets that are actually using the fields of it?
Also, even if you did manage to find all PLs that have %asset_metadata_foo% in them, you wouldn’t know which field that’s referring to because there could be multiple metadata fields in the system with the name “foo”.