Hey folks, I’m new to obsidian and atomic notes. I’ve done quite a bit of searching to try to find a solution but I’m not totally sure what to look for. I’ve also dabbled a bit here and there with text editors and data management but I still have large gaps in my knowledge.
What I’m trying to do
My goal right now is to have a list of movies, both that I’ve watched and that I want to watch, and be able to quickly see a subset of them based on director, genre, theme, year and other properties, or any combination thereof.
Things I have tried
So far I have made a note for each movie in my list and tagged them. Initially I had a flat tag structure in the front matter (for example the tag list for a movie might look like: Italian European Rosselini BW Neorealist). Then I changed it to a nested structure (origin/European/Italian director/Rosselini scene/Neorealist) for easier navigation in the tab pane. I was using Dataview on a separate note to display a list of whatever grouping of movies I wanted to look for.
Now I think I’d like to try switching to a link based system. On each movie note I’d have a link to each of those properties, and separate notes for each director, scene, country, etc. so that I could add notes about each of those topics. I’ve made a template note with a list that looks like this
Director: [Director]Director.md
Stars: [Star]Star.md
Country of production: [Country]Country.md
Continent of production: [Continent]Continent.md
Country of setting: [Country]Country.md
Year: [Year]Year.md
Genre: [Genre]Genre.md
Scene: [Scene]Scene.md
Themes: [Theme]Theme.md
Format: [Format]Format.md
My question is this: is there a way to take the existing data in the nested tags and replace the text in the template with the relevant string en masse for all the notes I’ve already made?
So to take director/Rosselini and do:
Director: [Director]Director.md → Director: [Rosselini]Rosselini.md
I started by trying to append this template to every note using notepad++ and then trying to use find and replace somehow to change the template text, but this is where I got stuck.
This isn’t (just) for laziness, I probably could’ve done it manually in the time that I’ve been searching. I’m also doing this to familiarize myself with Obsidian and the different data structures I can use with it. So I’m also open to suggestions for other ways to structure this or visualize the results. Thanks for the help, I’m glad to be part of this cool community.