Possible to use Dataview and Embeds to make something like an encyclopedia?

[JimK]

What I’m trying to do

Hi!

I have a bunch of files in a folder. Each file has a single character description from a medieval world for writing and RPGs. I want to use a dataview to embed them all in one document if possible. The end result would be somewhat like a dictionary/encyclopedia.

Name char 1
Description char 1

Name char 2
Description char 2
Description char 2, second paragraph

Name char 3
Description char 3

All file/folder/data below is just made for this post feel free to use whatever names in the dataview are easiest.

Folder:
DVstory

Files:
Characters.md
Jen.md
Bob.md
Rover.md

Typical file contents

---
Various yaml (different ones for characters, places, things, etc)
---

Name of character
One or more paragraphs of description

Example:

Type: Person
Created: 
Modified: 
Gender: Male
Side: Good
cssclass: "Story-Person"

Bob
Some guy named Bob.

If I use a dataview like this

```dataview
TABLE without ID file.link as Name
FROM "DVstory"
WHERE file.name != "Characters"
Sort Name ascending
```

I get a table like this

Name (3)
Bob
Jen
Rover

Which is great as I have that (with other fields pulled from yaml) as an index to the characters. However I would also like to create a separate file that has all the data embedded via a dataview like this:

Bob
Some guy named Bob.

Jen
Some girl named Jen.

Rover
Some dog named Rover

where each of those is an embed of the file of the characters name

![[Bob]]
![[Jen]]
![[Rover]]

I see in the Dataview docs there is an embed function but I am not sure how to use it to do what I want.

Things I have tried

Searching forums, dataview docs, messing around with dataview’s embed function

here are some of the dvs I have tried

```dataview
TABLE without ID file.link as Name
FROM "DVstory"
WHERE file.name != "Characters"

followed by one of the following and several other iterations I don’t recall:

Where embed(file.name, Name)
Where embed(file.name, file.link)
Where embed(name, file.name)
Where embed(name, file.link)
Where embed(file.link, name)
Where embed(file.link, file.name)
Where embed(Name)
Where embed(file.name)
Where embed(file.link)

also tried those without the where clause. Some of them will give a list of the files but not the contents.

Am I maybe misunderstanding and Dataview’s embed is not the same as Obsidan’s embed?

If not, what am I doing wrong in setting up the Dataview?

[holroy]

Embedding and dataview are not on friendly terms, so I would much rather switch up your syntax a bit, and do something like:

Bob
description:: Some guy named Bob

And if you’ve got only one of these within each note. Aka one note for one name/description pair, you could do something like:

```dataview
TABLE WITHOUT ID file.link as Name, description
FROM "DVstory"
WHERE file.name != "Characters"
SORT Name ascending
```

[JimK]

Thanks @holroy,

I was more hoping more for a paragraph style then a table style. Some of the descriptions are many paragraphs and putting them in a column would makes them take up a lot more vertical space. It isn’t super important so I will just do without and hope someday dataviews will become compatible with embeds. Or maybe I’ll just do it your way and use a short summary description. I’ll try it out that way and see.