Custom Reporting on Page Elements?

Help
1

Custom Reporting

I’m trying to figure out a way to automate building my reports within obsidian. Any suggestions, advice, or pointing me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated. Not sure what the right direction is to handle this:

  • maybe there’s a built-in way that I haven’t figured out yet?
  • maybe there’s a plugin that’ll do this?
  • maybe I need to do a little custom dev work on my own?

Example File Structure

So here’s the basic use-case, I’ve got several file structures in my notebook that look like this:

  • customers/_index_
  • customers/customer_one/_index_
  • customers/customer_one/meetings/<FILES>
  • customers/customer_one/projects/first_project/_index_
  • customers/customer_two/_index_
  • customers/customer_fourty/projects/some_project
  • customers/customer_fourty/projects/another_project
  • project/some_project

In this example:

  • there is a main customers/_index_ file that is mapped to the directory view using the obsidian-folder-note-plugin
  • each directory has a customer ‘summary’, named _index_
  • i’m generating most file structures from templates, similar items have identical sections and yaml front matter
  • each _index__ file is built from a template, and has the same sections and yaml front matter

Example File

Here’s an example of a file:

---
Created: 2021-03-01
Tags: [customers/customer_one, type/customer-summary]

Customer: 
  Name: Example Customer One
  Status: Happy  
---


# Customer Name

## Summary
<SUMMARY_TEXT>

## Projects

## Meetings
    
| Date       | Meeting Notes   | Who                    | 
| ---------- | --------------- | ---------------------- |
| 2019-02-23 | [[Meeting Two]] | Person One             |
| 2018-11-28 | [[Meeting One]] | Person One, Person Two |

Example Report

I’d like to be able to extract elements out of pages and front matter to automate building reports … right now, I’m manually doing that, like this:

Name Status Projects
Customer One Happy First Project
Customer Two Sad N/A
… … …
Customer Fourty Happy Some Project, Another Project

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. New to Obsidian and just trying to figure out which direction I need to head in. :wink:

2

Have you looked into pandoc and it’s templates?

3

I’ve used pandoc in other contexts … primarily with python and converting between markup file types … and I’ve worked a lot with sphinx …

Is there a way to process the markup elements from within obsidian in a similar way (obviously through building a plugin) but something more direct I’m missing?

4

Scratch that, I misunderstood what type of report you wanted. You might want to look into the dataview plugin.

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5

@argentum thank ye - precisely what I was looking for :wink:

1 Like