Adding Tags and Properties to Links

[drwallace]

Hi all, new to the forum and Obsidian, so apologies if this is a Newbie question

What I’m trying to do

I am using Obsidian to create networked notes and connections. I love the graph feature that shows how notes are related to each other, but I can’t figure out how to assign properties to the links themselves.

Normally in a network diagram, you have nodes (which are the notes in Obsidian) and edges (which are the links). We can add lots of metadata to the notes (tags, data view, etc.), but I can’t figure out a way to append metadata to the links. There is a little bit of this in Canvas, where I can add a note to an arrow, but it would be great to be able to add detailed information to the arrows (links) that connect different notes together.

If I had this ability, I could create complex network diagrams filtered not only by node properties (notes), but also by edge properties (links).

Here’s an example use case:
I want to capture all of the companies and contacts I make when attending a conference. There are lots of interrelationships between the notes, and I want to be able to sort and filter by the nature of those relationships:

WorkShow - The event I attended

• People I met: Andrea, Bob, Charlie
• Companies: Xylex, YouCorp, Zippy

In the notes for each of the above, I want to capture information that is intrinsic / specific to each of the entitites. Separately, I would like to capture information about the relationships between each of them. This would naturally be associated with the links. Things I might like to capture:

• Relationship -

  • Bob works for Xylex

• Andrea is Works for Xylex

• Andrea is Bob’s Boss

• Additional properties of the links:

  • Dates associated with the relationship (e.g. startdate, enddate)
  • What is the relationship? (works for, is friends with, knows, sponsored, etc.)
  • Direction of relationships (can do this in Canvas, for example)

Things I have tried

I found a similar question, but no answer:

Tagged Links

I think it would be useful if links could be tagged, in particular for graph view. Use case or problem I find myself wanting to use tags to relate different projects (pages) together. For example, a #depends tag, to indicate one project depends on another, or #blockedby to indicate one project is blocked by another one. Proposed solution I propose making links taggable. If I could tag links, that would allow me to do this in a way that associates the two pages together in a directional way. Th…

I think the idea of nested data view data would address this, but my understanding is that links nested in dataview quit working for backlink / link summaries. Ideally, would like to use inline dataview markup and have just the link name show in reading view.

Thanks in advance … this would be game-changing for me!

[holroy]

It’s not doable as of today to attach tags and/or properties to link. You can however in recent versions create properties which have links. Not quite sure how they work within the graph view (if at all), but maybe that could target some of your issue.

The post you linked is a feature request, which is just that a request for a feature not implemented yet (and it’s not guaranteed that it’ll ever be implemented either). So add your support to that request, and give the developers a little more incentiv to implement it.

[drwallace]

Thanks for the reply. I’ll definitely try that. Just for clarification, I am planning to build my diagrams outside of Obsidian (though it would be awesome if the capability were native in Graph View.)