Filtered list or primitive database in Obsidian

Help
1

What I’m trying to do

I’m trying to maintain the list of Books in the Obsidian with minimal structure and filtering capability. i. e.

John Doe | “Good Poetry” | On-Red-Shelf | To-sell-out
Martin Smith | “Bad Poetry” | On-Green-Shelf | My-Fellow
etc

And want to be able to see only books that are My-Fellow or On-Red-Shelf, similar way as Excel or Google Sheet does. The ability to create a view would be ever better.

Is there any plugins or methods that help me to achieve this or its’ completely misuse of Obsidian and I should take other tool?

2

This seems like an ideal use case for the core plugin bases (Introduction to Bases - Obsidian Help).

2 Likes
3

Tried it - it’s very close to what I need. Thank you.

Do I understand correctly, that each row in a base is the file in the notes tree?

Is there any support for dropdown for the properties with restricted list of values (e.g. STATUS: Active, Archived, Closed etc)?

4

Yes, every row in a Bases table represents a note within you vault.

Do you mean if there is a dropdown menu with value suggestions such as this:

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5

Hmm, not quite ecological in terms of resource usage - but OK.

Dropdown - Yes. I see the tool-tip with suggestion, but would like to limit value of property to certain pre-defined items.

6

What do you exactly mean by that?

No, I am not aware of a way to pre-defined the suggestions. It is always limited to the current values of a property. So if you want a property to show only:

you need to have at least one note within you vault with each of these values set in the frontmatter. If you have some note with STATUS: example in the frontmatter, examplewill also be suggested.

7

Small files pollute the filesystem and memory cache i. e. overhead of handling about 100 files less that 4Kb each is significant. Especially for ext4 family of filesystems.

But so it goes.

Thank you for your support!

8

But how I can handle duplicates.

e.g. I have two books with the same title and author but different publisher.

Is there a better way to handle it than create two separate files?

9

I can only speak from the user perspective, but even with many bases with a lot of files I have yet not seen any performance issues on my devices.

It depends on how you structure your notes. Is it for you the same book or not? For my audiobooks, I create two notes in such a case, because they are different to me.

If you want to have them as one note, you could make the publisher property a list property so you can add multiple publishers.