Properties & Bases: Support multi-level YAML (Mapping of Mappings, nested attributes, )

Until properties arrived, I also made use of nested tags in huge way, but did decide to go thru the entire vault and replace them with properties. It was a good move.

I used the Tags pane in the right sidebar sorted by frequency (high to low). Then I started with the nested tags and added properties for those notes. There are some plugins that assist with this; Tag Wrangler is noteable. I did keep the nested tags for a while so I could still peruse the vault while it was being revised.

One thing I can say is that that several months long “forced review” was fruitful; many of the notes I had captured or created (my own thoughts) had been forgotten. This was the most useful part of the endeavor.

I did keep at least one tag for each note - single tags that reflect what the note is about at a high level. In the former world I had at tag “writing” then a descending tree of writing/craft, writing/process …

Now I have a single tag “writing” and then a pertaining list property that can contain “craft” and “plot” and “process” …

Afterwards it struck me that nested tags is akin to nested folders and, in from my vantive, I get a much more flexible querying environment with properties. And it alleviates issues like "what if this belongs in multiple places? or “where did I put that note?”.

All that said, there’s no reason you can’t continue. Nested tags can be used in the Bases filters. THis could ease the transition.

I would also really, really like to see Bases support for nested properties – I’m a very heavy Meta-Bind user and this would revolutionize my workflow!

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+1

It would be a great for existing notes and may also be great to organise Quarto projects.

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I tried Bases function in the new release. Without the support for Nested YAML, it is not good enough for me. I even found someone in a similar situation posted about nested yaml, recently, Nested YAML Frontmatter for Obsidian Book Notes - BBBBlog suggesting the need for the support. The author ended up flatten his 400+ notes. But I cannot do this with my vault. I am stuck with make.md and would like to pop this thread up and hope the Obsidian team would implement the support for Nested YAML.

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Has anyone tried the latest 1.10.0 catalyst version?

ChangeLog shows updates to support nest properties, not sure whether it provides the long-awaited feature to support display of nested yaml header.

* New List view lets you display files as bulleted lists and numbered lists. Supports multi-line content and nested properties.
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I can check later today

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Hi. Only commenting on your last paragraph:

What I’m waiting for is what we do with Links. Will they be objects just like notes, have properties, and be searchable. That would make for a multi dimensional utopia?

This would be a +1 for me, because it would get me closer to replicate plectica systems (dsrp) mapping, where relationships (links) also can be defined and “dsrp´d”. What then is missing (i.e. in Canvas, would be a way to switch visibility on map objects, via perspectives. I suppose this last perspective bit could be achieved with tags also.

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Sorry, it doesn’t.

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I’ve run into similar issues when using Properties/Front-Matter to create events in the Calendarium plug in.
It seems like this could be partially addressed by adding more Property types, specifically an Object type, or maybe by allowing the creation of custom types. In addition, it may be prudent to allow lists of any Property type, rather than having a dedicated List type.

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+1. Honestly, it’s pretty frustrating this is still missing. Nested properties aren’t a luxury, they’re essential for any kind of structured data. With Bases now gaining more features, supporting nested properties is more important.

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Native nested properties and native link types would be an absolute game changer. Even after 5 years of using obsidian, the lack of these features makes it feel half baked to me. I can never get a proper vault done because these two things are absolutely integral to how I think and remember stuffs

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+1

For example, a lot of my files use:

urls:
linkedin:
instagram:
github:
wiki:

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+1 from me.
i can’t continue to add yaml into yaml just to short it
at this point i have to go
type:media
media-type:youtube
createa another yaml just to sublist it

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This would be game changing. It matches the way I think.
Right now I use underscores as separators but it would be so much easier to have an “Object” that encompass everything and shows only properties & property suggestions “attached” to that object.

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Ok, so I tried make.md. it was nice for a while but it was dog slow and ended up crashing my obsidian with a thousand notes

The wait is over (at least if you are curious enough to try a beta version). I just released the first rather stable beta release version of my Nested Properties Editor and Advanced Metadata Templating Plugin. The plugin is still called obsidian-eln-plugin because I initially developed it for the purpose of an Electronic Lab Notebook system. However, the architecture of the plugin could be used for any type of templates. Further the NPE which is part of the plugin can be used completely independently form the note and metadata templating system, however it is planned to make the NPE aware of the note templates to improve metadata consistency.

More details about the plugin you can find in my post in the “Share & showcase” section:
Plugin: Template Architecture and Nested Properties Editor for Complex Metadata Structures