What I’m trying to do
I have been using Obsidian as my personal movie watching diary for over a year now and it works great. I have the Media DB plugin with an OMDB API key, and I’ve connected it to Templater so that whenever I use the create movie note command, Templater runs and puts the movie in my diary folder. This pulls the movie metadata, prompts me to rate and comment on my experience, and formats everything for me to then use Dataview to see my movie stats over time. For a single person setup, this is perfect. But my partner wants to have a shared movie diary space. I have Sync and we share a vault, so that part isn’t a problem. The problem is that Obsidian doesn’t really work well for real-time collaborative editing. I created a setup where there are two movie templates, one for each of us. I used Templater to call the OMDB API directly instead of running through Media DB, because I can’t set different movie folders with the Media DB plugin. This sort of works, but not great. I’m not as experienced with Templater so instead of being a single API call it’s an API call for every single metadata field. It puts the movie in the correct folder with the essential information, but you can’t search and scroll through potential movie matches, and if we both try to run our template at the same time, we get stuck in a prompt loop and have to force close the app. So we have to take turns logging.
I’m not looking for answers to all these little details of issues I encountered while trying to set this up. I’m actually wondering if anyone else has tried to create a shared vault setup like this and how you designed it? My conclusion is that editing the same file at the same time is a problem, and calling the same API at the same time might be a problem. I only need the movie details once really, so I’m wondering if it would make more sense to only have one person call the API movie details, and the other person just rates and comments in a separate file. I want to avoid taking turns rating.
Things I have tried
I couldn’t find a lot of information from others doing this. I tried reading through Templater documentation, looked through several other vault examples that use Templater, some TTRPG examples which didn’t seem to fit my needs.
I have successfully created a two person TV diary. We use a single template only for the episodes, and I prep a TV series file for each of us ahead of time, so it doesn’t have the same API issue. Running the same Templater template at the same time hasn’t been a problem in that use case.