Notes only referenced in Dataview are listed as "unlinked". Which is true, but

Help
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1

Not really asking for help, more an open question. How do you deal with this scenario?

I have Daily Notes, and Months, and Years. All have Dataview queries displaying their “children”. Most of these Periodic notes are not directly linked from anywhere else, and that means they show up as “unlinked” when I search for unlinked notes. It’s true, they are unlinked, but they aren’t really “orphaned”.

How do you deal with this? Is there a way to exclude these from the search?

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Some ideas to consider, but first; how do you generate all of these notes, and how do you find the “unlinked”/“orphans” as you call them?

  • If you’re using Templater to generate the files in combination with Dataview, you might consider inserting fixed links to the years, monthly and weekly notes, as they’re not very likely to change during the existence of a given note
  • You might also consider inserting some other fixed link, possible to your “home” page or something describing your setup or similar (maybe even a “dummy” link (would a self-link work?))
  • As a variation of the previous point, what about linking to a “fixed” collation page which gives shortcuts to either of all these notes". I.e. it could list either all or some of the preceding and future(?) notes for the yearly, monthly and weekly notes. Kind of like a quick switcher to easily go back/forth between these kind of notes
  • Depending on how you find these in the first place, you could also consider tagging or marking them so they don’t appear in your searches for “unlinked” or “orphans”, possibly just exclude all of your journal notes in general
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I use the plugin “Find orphaned files and broken links” which generates a nice note with all the info. There’s no way to exclude stuff I’m aware of.

Good point about the dates being unlikely to change. Is there a way to copy a dataview output to Markdown?

4

In the settings section of Find orphaned files and broken links you’ve got the possibility to exclude both links, files and folders, so you could just add your journals folder to the directories to be excluded, and that would most likely do it.

You’ve also got the option to exclude files tagged with something special, so you could add like a “non-orphan” or similar to files which turns up in your vault, but which you don’t consider to be a non-orphan.

From with Templater you could trigger a Dataview query and use the dv.markdownTable, dv.markdownList and dv.markdownTaskList to generate markdown to be added to the template. Various examples have been given in this forum during the last year.

And if you do a more specific query to just get a number or some text, you could also just append it to the tR variable, or assign it to another variable which you could then re-use later on in your template.

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Thanks, I’ll check the settings for excluding again. That’s probably the simplest way.
I kind of want to have everything linked - but I think that’s just the way my mind works. to that end, I’ll check out your suggestion using Templater and Dataview.

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