FutureKiIlerFeature? - being able to change frontmatter templates after the fact – my current workaround – can I do better?

TLDR VERSION:
My current workaround for being able to automatically rename and add properties inside the frontmatter after the fact is to use Dummy-Properties, that I can search and replace with Visual Studio Code when needed – can I do better?


DISCLAIMER: I am relatively new to Obsidian, and I haven’t looked into templater in depth.
I am looking for “reasonably low investment – high impact solutions”. I find QuickAdd and the simple Dataview (without Java Script) very intuitive and powerful.


CONTEXT – BUILDING A DATABASE FOR MY FAVORITE STORY ELEMENTS.
WHICH I HAVE BEGUN TO POPULATE, BECAUSE WHAT LITTLE I HAVE ALREADY WORKS SO WELL

I am currently using Obsidian for building something like “my private version of tv-tropes” – if tv-tropes were allowed to hold the actual content as well.

Basically something that that provides easy access to my favorite stories, scenes, characters, relationships, constellations and plots.

To achieve this, I have build a template for each of them, together with a corresponding template inside QuickAdd, that allows me to quickly and efficiently populate my little database.

Since using nothing else but QuickAdd and Dataview has already proved so incredibly powerful, to give me a whole range of features I was striving for, I have begun to populate my database.

Which brings me in the situation that we all know, that, whenever I come up with an improvement for my tool, I would need to make countless changes that would simply be too much work to do manually. (I am trying not to go overboard with populating my database in case I should need to make changes manually, but it’s hard to resist since the payoff is so big :slight_smile: )


IT WOULD BE SO COOL TO BE ABLE TO CHANGE TEMPLATES AFTER THE FACT

Arguably one of the killer features of Obsidian is, that it allows me to change the name and location of files and folders, without breaking the existing Links.

Something I would imagine to be incredibly cool, is if I could do the same with the keys inside my frontmatter.

I would create the frontmatter with a template, which then rules this part of the frontmatter forever, so to speak. So that any time I change the template, the corresponding frontmatters across all notes would automatically update.

This way I would be able to

  • add new keys

  • rename existing keys

  • change the order of existing keys

without effecting any of the values I have assigned to those keys, and without effecting any additional properties that might be in the fontmatter.


MY CURRENT WORKAROUND

Currently, I am using search and replace inside Visual Studio Code for renaming, and I have introduced Dummy keys, that I can search and replace to add new keys that might prove to be helpful in the future.

Can I do better?

How do you approach this?

Does templater provide a solution for this?

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If you look at @SiliasOS’s 2024 efforts, he’s been successful tackling these things.

This gets more help at Help section.

I also found this thread really helpful: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/how-to-reuse-a-dataview-query-dql/

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Wow, this sounds like it could be exactly what I was looking for, thank you so much!
And on top of it, it also contains the answer to another question I was having :slight_smile:

I haven’t quite gathered the courage to tackle JS yet, but from everything I’ve understood, this sounds like a perfectly working solution.

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