Fantastic to have the ability to add links to properties now. One drawback I see though is that needing the square brackets and quotation marks reduces the interoperability with other programs. For example, I use pandoc to create PDF/HTML journal articles from markdown files with fields such as "author: " "affiliation: " etc. If I wanted to link to these values in Obsidian though, it would mess up my final output.
Proposed solution
Inspired by the fact that you can have URLs and email addresses automatically recognized in properties, I would propose creating a property type called “link” (ideally like “list” so that multiple values can be entered) in which all values are automatically treated as links. I’m imagining that this would work like wikilinks in the body of files – i.e. with autocomplete and the ability to have “ghost” links for not-yet-created files.
The idea is that it would add something to the layer that obsidian is adding to the YAML but would be “invisible” to other programs, thereby maximising interoperability.
I know there might be technical reasons why this is not possible, but I thought I would put it out there fwiw.
Current workaround (optional)
Would need to create multiple keys, one with a link and one for the purposes of using with pandoc.
In order to make Obsidian Properties a more enjoyable experience, it is a core feature to have robust property types with validation, including validating URL strings.
Proposed solution
I propose that a new Property Type be added called URL. This type works the same as the already existing Text Property Type except Obsidian validates the string to ensure that it is a valid URL.
If a user tries to enter a non-URL into the Properties editor, then Obsidian will display an error, and will not save the invalid URL.
If a non-valid URL already exists in the markdown text then the Properties editor will leave the invalid URL in the markdown text, as is, but highlight it red so that the user can clearly see that it is an invalid URL.
It would be nice if there were a property in general that would support having multiple links, regardless of if they’re internal links in wikilink-format ([[otherfile]] or [[otherfile|text of link]]) or markdown link format([text of link](otherfile.md)) or external links ([text of link](<url>))
I guess given the request for supporting multiple links that makes this feature request distantly somewhat related to this one from me? I’m somewhat uncertain if that means I should close mine there as solving this partially (or maybe fully depending on implementation) solves the other feature request.
I recently stumbled over this as well!
Not quite obvious, but definitely does the job.
Not sure if the FR is asking something different but definitely huge thanks for pointing this one out.
@CrisNeagu This could be relevant for you as well. As in, that you can just add a property and make it off property-type “list”.
Yes, I’m aware of that. You can make it a list property and add multiple URLs, but because you cannot give the links an alias, they end up taking a lot of screen space and don’t look human readable at all.
