Add number range to properties

Feature requests
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1

Use case or problem

I want to add numbers as a range in properties to some of my notes. I’m a gardener and maintain notes on specific species of plants I grow. I would like to look up, for example, the development time from seed to fruit, days to germinate or optimal temperature range for growth. Some of these data have one number, e.g. minimum germination temperature. Others are a range, like development times (counted in days), say 55-80. Combined with dataview, this could be a tremendously useful tool for me. For example, I could order a table of the fastest crops I grow or only look at the crops that grow in a specific optimal temperature range.

Obsidian properties doesn’t allow for a range in the numbers property. If I put a range into the number property, it seems to be accepted at first. Later it then frustratingly disappears from my note. I have wasted 3-4 hours of work like this, having had copied databases of crop data into the number property, just to see it disappeared next time I opened Obsidian.

Proposed solution

Either make it possible to add ranges (X-Y) to the number property or add another property with that possibility.

Current workaround (optional)

At the moment I do one of two unsatisfying things:

  1. Add the number range as a text property. That way I can see the data point when looking up the note and it doesn’t disappear. The price I pay is that dataview doesn’t seem to be able to order text properties numerically. So if I ask it to sort a table in “germination_time_in_days” and some of those notes have ranges (4-7) then the table remains unsorted.
  2. Add two different numerical properties indicating minimum and maximum number. Then I would have, for example, “germination_time_in_days_minimum” and “germination_time_in_days_maximum”. This is more work. And I can’t show the data point in property together with other notes that just have one number (do I put that in minimum or maximum? There’s no clear answer and if I idiosyncratically decide to always put it in minimum, the result will be ambiguous later on).
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