Can property types be mass-edited?

Help
1

What I’m trying to do

I’m adding properties to an already-existing vault in order to use Bases with it. I used a script (or, rather, Claude Code used a script) to add the properties to all of my existing files using a template I provided. But I didn’t realize until later when I was trying to work with the data that it didn’t carry over the property TYPES. Everything is just being treated as a text property. What I want to be able to do is mass-edit a given property so it is, say, a checkbox or a list property across all files.

Things I have tried

I tried the all properties view, but as best I’ve been able to figure out, nothing is EDITABLE from there; it’s just a search.

I’m guessing there’s probably a plugin that will do this, but I’ve tried a couple and none of the ones I’ve found so far appear to do what I want. (For example, they’ll add a property to files where it doesn’t exist or they’ll define the value, but I haven’t found one that will edit the type.) Is there a way to do this, either natively or via plugin?

2

I don’t think so because working with properties is quite new thing. There are no such sophisticated tools. You need to use a tool that can read and write properties and then perform the required logic to change the property type. In python there is for example this package caput that reads/writes properties from text files that begin with ---\n.

3

Open the All properties tab, right click your property, hover Property type, and select the type you want:

property types
property types732×529 28.8 KB

If your notes don’t yet have values for that property, you’re good to go.

But if some of the notes already have values for that property, then you might have to clean them up to match the new type.

mismatched types

For example, a text property that has the value “true” looks like this:

---
your property: "true"
---

whereas a checkbox property that is checked looks like this:

---
your property: true
---

and a list property looks like this:

---
your property:
  - "true"
---

I think that changing from text to date won’t cause any problems unless Claude put quotation marks around the dates.

Changing from text to number will leave unwanted quotation marks.

When there’s a mismatch, Obsidian shows an orange alert triangle in Live Preview and Reading:

property type mismatch
property type mismatch610×222 10.3 KB

You have a few options for fixing it.

You could click the orange icon then click Update in the explanation pop-up. You would have to do this note by note.

You could use another text editor or command line to do a batch regex replace. How easy or complex this method would be depends on the type and values you’re converting. If it’s just deleting quotation marks, no sweat. If you have in a single text line what was supposed to be multi-line list items, sweat.

Another option is to tell Claude Code about the mistake, remind it that you need to convert to YAML syntax for your desired type, (make sure your files back-up is up to date,) and let Claude fix it.