Over the last year, I have slowly built a Obsidian database for work using a build measure learn approach and while adapting new and better data practices and workflow over time.
Right now, I am adopting better consistency with the use of MOCs, and it is here I have come across a best practice struggle on where to keep my linked parents (and siblings). First, I started linking for instance parent [[projects]] or related [[person]] in the YAML field. This gave a simple and beautiful solution with nice consistency and clean documents.
But this created issues with dataview. I wasn’t able to easily and coherently make it separate between frontmatter items with and without obsidian linking. So I went for a solution without MOCs. Now I want the MOC, and I need it to link. so right now Im in between two systems, not knowing what is the best practice. Right now my simplified approach is like so-ish:
--- YAML
project : Project name
--- /YAML
project:: [[Project name]]
body
What is best practice here? Both to have a healthy set of templates and to be able to consistently navigate back and forth between parents and siblings?
I may not be answering the title here and my latest inputs regarding these questions have been pretty boring as I keep pointing to demo vaults where these ‘best practices’ are very well set up:
The best practice os of recent version of Dataview is to use a proper link in the property. That is that the link in the property (in source mode) looks like:
---
project: "[[Project name]]"
---
This should provide you with clean crisp links, easily trackable/queryable through the project property. I’m not sure which issue you had, but in the past you could do project: [[Project name]] in the yaml/property section, and it worked in some cases. Please don’t use this syntax anymore.
The newer syntax is cleaner and works across various plugins and within the core Obsidian, and is properly handled when renaming and handling links in general.
On a side note, if you actually typed your example into a note, you’d end up with a property called project which had two values, namely Project name and the link [[Project name]].
And if you don’t like to use properties, you could have used just the last inline field notation and it should also work across the board. Note that omission of the quotes around the link when using in the body part of a note.
You don’t need to be in source mode, but the links need to look like that in source mode. But you can easily add the links when in live preview using the normal syntax.