Reference to "self"

Use case or problem

I frequently create “master” notes (sometimes referred to “indices” or “maps-of-content”) that reference lots of other sub-notes. A good example, is a note for a book or a course. Such a note typically has links to other pages for the chapters in the book or the lessons in the course.

The dataview plugin is a fantastic way of adding links to those sub-notes without explicitly inserting them. All the sub-notes contain a link to the master page, and then the dataview query includes a search for pages which reference the master page.

In situations like this, it would be incredibly convenient if the master page reference within the query could be a special type of link which is a reference to self. Example: [[{{self}}]] (or some other syntax. That way, if the file name of the master page changed, the link would be maintained.

Alternatively, it would be great if Obsidian automatically updated self-referential links within a note (e.g., for a note “A”, a link [[A]] within A) when the file name of the note is changed. This does not appear to happen.

Proposed solution

(see above)

Current workaround (optional)

Manually insert self-referential links and manually update them if the file name of the note changes.

Related feature requests (optional)

1 Like

Options → Files & Links → Automatically update internal links → Checked

If you turn that on, a link to a note’s own self will update just fine.

Thank you for the reply, but that is not exactly what I’m looking for. What I’m after is a way to embed a meta-link to the current page that is interpreted by a plugin like data view to always expand into the name of the current page. Perhaps this has more to do with the plugin than it does with the main Obsidian app.

Ah. Well then perhaps it would be best to make a feature request on the project’s Github.

I’m replying to this part specifically. It seems incorrect to me. This should work fine: