Frontmatter updates

[SanDiegoBoy]

Looking for some assistance
I work with clients from different companies. I keep meeting notes and people notes.
On my meeting notes, I have meeting participants and I enter here the participants (which exist on people notes).
When I create a people note,
-the title of the note is the person’s name “John Smith”
-I fill out the company name. Example “Contoso”
-I set the alias to “John Smith (Contoso)” ({file name} ({Company})
So on my meeting notes (under participants) I would enter the alias as it is best for me to see the company name here as opposed to simply the name

Is there any way to automate the alias step?

[blue_emperor]

In other words you want to automatically generate properties when creating a note. This can be done using Templater, Linter, Shell commands and QuickAdd (inline scripts). Obviously all of them are advanced community plugins so crafting the solution will take up time even by experienced users.

This example is from Obsidian dev docs:
https://docs.obsidian.md/Reference/TypeScript+API/FileManager/processFrontMatter

app.fileManager.processFrontMatter(file, (frontmatter) => {
    frontmatter['key1'] = value;
    delete frontmatter['key2'];
});

[SanDiegoBoy]

Thanks
So I am kind getting the hang of it
I was able to put together a rudimentary way to do this
My current flow,

1. During a meeting I realized I need to add a participant, I start typing and if the person exists use that entry. Otherwise type name as text
2. Right after the meeting, see participant list for participants that are not wikilinks but text. I manually add [[ and ]] to make it a wikilink
3. I click the wikilink and create a blank note
4. Use templater to create a people note (has a couple of templater scripts - created from current date and name from file name
5. I manually enter the company name
6. I manually compose alias with name - company name

For step 6

a. I can not use templater normally for alias since it would be executed when I create the note when company is not populated
b. Instead of step 6, I can copy / paste the templater script on the alias field and execute right there

[blue_emperor]

@SanDiegoBoy

Instead of step 6, I can copy / paste the templater script on the alias field and execute right there

Yes this is kind of solution and it requires pressing a keyboard shortcut or ⌘P and selecting Templater: Insert templates/my template 1.md.

templates/my template 1.md:

<% tp.file.title %> (<% tp.frontmatter["company"] %>)

[SanDiegoBoy]

Thanks
I also see some inspiration here

Shortcut/Macro to insert tag in frontmatter

This doesn’t completely answer your question as you’ll need to add a template around this, but I have a very concise function for updating frontmatter: function updateFrontmatter(contents, field, value) { const f = contents.match(/^---\n(.*?)\n---\n(.*)$/s) const v = `${field}: ${value}` const x = new RegExp(`^${field}:.*$`, 'm') const [s, e] = f ? [`${f[1]}\n`, f[2]] : ['', contents] return f && f[1].match(x) ? contents.replace(x, v) : `---\n${s}${v}\n---\n${e}` } So if yo…

So far I have only used templater when creating a new file but it seems you can use templater to execute a script on an existing note and modify carefully certain fields

[blue_emperor]

I looked that thread. Function app.vault.modify was used to modify the whole file. This is very clunky solution and you should use app.fileManager.processFrontMatter instead. In your case you need to programmatically ask values when creating your file because otherwise you need to create your file manually and then apply the shortcut. You can ask values using Modal form community plugin. In this case the code look like this

---
<%*
const modalForm = app.plugins.plugins.modalforms.api;
const result = await modalForm.openForm('example-form');
tR += result.asFrontmatterString();
-%>
---

In above asFrontmatterString() is provided by the plugin. The template/code is used to generate full frontmatter and I think you should use app.fileManager.processFrontMatter to modify existing frontmatter.