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Working with inline fields in Dataview

2021-09-27
2022-10-06
Obsidian Obsidian-Plugins Workflow Dataview

I am using Dataview in Obsidian to create some light automation in Obsidian, similar to what you could do in something like Notion. There's an inline syntax for settings fields.

Examples

Instead of a TOML header like:

---
summary: "This note is important"
---

# Your note

You can inline it into the text somewhere:

# Your note

Some note on something or something.

summary:: This note is important

Note the special syntax, using two colons to let Dataview know you specify a field.

The syntax seems to work with most standard types, like texts, numbers, booleans, but also with dates or durations. You can also specify links, which are parsed as usual if put into the main body of the note, whereas they are not included in backlinks or graph view if you put them into the TOML header.

Implicit arrays

Actually, I found that it seems to also implcitly create arrays if used multiple times. Thus, the following TOML header:

can be replaced with these headings:

# people:: Mike

Some note about Mike


# people:: Paul

Another note about Paul

Well, it's a bit ugly but it can be less redundant if you do something like meeting notes.

Not working: Nested objects

For my meeting notes, I tried to setup something, where I could specify a text summary for each person. E.g. in TOML,

summary:
- Mike: "Summary for Mike"
- Paul: "Summary for Paul"

and then e.g., try to plot a table of all meetings where Mike presented and their summaries. It's a bit clunky but it somewhat works.

Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a way to inline objects like this.


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Dr. Marc A. Kastner

I am an assistant professor working on computer vision and multimodal understanding. I am interested in task- and knowledge management. In my free time, I blog on productivity workflows and apps.

For my professional portfolio, please visit: marc-kastner.com

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