Some issues with properties (and bad YAML)

[greay]

Issue 1:

I have a bunch of old notes from when I used the Breadcrumbs plugin (I no longer do). These have a line in the frontmatter like this:

---
parent: [[some note]]
---

Which, AFAIK, is invalid YAML, but it did do the trick for a while. But with the new properties display, these show up as an unknown datatype & are converted to [["some note"]]. I’m unable to edit them in any way. I can’t change the type to “text” and I can’t edit the value without switching the display to raw.

Issue 2:

I’m going through and switching these parent lines to categories and adding links to other notes. Sometimes “categories” is shown as a suggestion when editing in the property display, but 9 times out of 10, it won’t suggest that and I don’t know why.

Issue 3:

While in raw mode, I (mistakenly) edited some notes like such:

---
categories: "[[Some note]]", "[[Some other MOC]]"
---

I know this was incorrect. But when I switch back to properties display, that line disappears. Additionally, that note no longer shows up in the properties display (sidebar) nor returns in the new property search syntax. I don’t actually know how to search for a note like this – since it doesn’t appear that you can do a plaintext search that includes the frontmatter.

[ariehen]

I haven’t used the new Search option [property] much yet, but for links, your YAML should look like this (and Obsidian will format it this way):

---
links: "[[Start Here]]"
categories:
  - "[[Some note]]"
  - "[[Some other MOC]]"
---

For now, if you are doing a cleanup of old notes, I’d switch to Source mode or change your Settings > Editor > Properties in document to Source. You can still make a mistake, of course, but you’ll get a clearer picture of what’s going IMHO.