Interacting with Other Notes

[ericbright2002]

First, let me say that this is already an amazing plug-in. Your Inline Scripts single-handedly convinced me to hop over to Obsidian for solo play, so thank you! My goal when I play RPGs solo is to never leave the journal where I'm typing out my game play nor do I want to flip between editing and reading mode (like with the Dice Rolls plug-in). With the upcoming table release your previewed earlier, I'll almost have everything I need for that, but there are a couple of things that would be useful if you are interested/have the time to incorporate them into future releases.

I'd love a command to create a new note in a specific folder. I had a templater script working for that (although it's broke today for some reason), but I used an inline script to output the templater script which then still had to Alt-R to run templater and then run a notevars to update the frontmatter variables. Would it be possible to create the file, apply a template, and then modify the frontmatter with a notevars command all in a single shortcut? From what I can tell, the expand commands in the shortcut files don't get executed until the end, so the creation would have to fully finish before the updating of frontmatter variables.

Along those same line, I'd love to be able to drop text or an image in another note without leaving my main journal note. For example, Ironsworn has vows where you mark progress, and those progress tracks are made up of ten images in a row. I'd like to be able to grab the contents under a heading (say ## Progress Track) and either replace it fully with the new images, append text/image to it if I want to keep a running record rather than current value, or prepend to it to keep the most recent at the top. Something like:

modifynote {note path to heading} {append - 0, prepend - 1, replace - 2} {content to add to note}

Does any of that sound feasible? If so, what can I do to help you with it?

[jon-heard]

These things are definitely possible. I'm trying to wrap up the next release at the moment. Once I'm done, I'll think on this and reply with a more detailed response.

For now, one question about the second idea: it'd be easy enough to modify a section of a document, as long as you can define the start and end of the section. What would define the end of the section? Perhaps using the following "##" would work?

[ericbright2002]

I think the end of the section would be defined by the next header or end of file? So you'd look for one to six # followed by a space or the end. Is that possible?

Also, since Obsidian updated to 1.03, notevars has stopped working. It says it updates frontmatter, but it's not actually doing so.

[jon-heard]

Ooh, thanks for pointing that out, I'll check it out and fix it for the next release.

[jon-heard]

Would it be possible to create the file, apply a template, and then modify the frontmatter with a notevars command all in a single shortcut?

I've added this to my todo list. I figure the shortcut definition could be file create {file-path: path text} {template: file text, default: ""}.

How should the frontmatter variables be updated, though? There could be one popup everywhere there's placeholder value in the template. Is there a standard for placeholder values in templates? If not, maybe something like { default: "xyz" } for text entry popups and { choices: "a, b, c" default: "b" } for a list selector?

---

modifynote {note path to heading} {append - 0, prepend - 1, replace - 2} {content to add to note}

I've added this to my todo list as well. How about file modify {file: path text} {start: regex string} {end: regex string} {action: >=0, 0=replace, 1=append, 2=prepend} {content: text}.

[ericbright2002]

The file create sounds great! That's really all I would need as I could write my own shortcut with regular notevars and the ??? filler to update the frontmatter.

For the modify file, the easiest thing might be to access headers. Obsidian already natively selects all the content in a header when using an internal link. I hope it would just be a matter of moving the cursor to the end (for append) or second line (for prepend to avoid the header itself). That could make it:
modify {file name} {header in the file} {action: >=0, 0=append, 1=prepend, 2=replace} {content: text}
That way it defaults to append rather than replace.