Templater add YAML string property

[mjl]

Use Templater to add date values as string values in YAML for a monthly template

I’ve tried to use Templater, but it may be way over my head. I got this idea to use monthly notes from the periodic notes plugin and dataview table to pull all weekly notes for that month in a view that just shows a summary and a link to the note.

Now, there may be a much easier way to accomplish this, and I realized I may be chewing off too much or have overlooked how to get this to happen.

Things I have tried

I’ve attempted to understand how to use Templater at point I create a new Monthly note to provide a YAML value for the week number and year, something I can use in the Dataview table query. I got the idea from somewhere on Redit.

<%"---"%>
created: 
status: 
tags:
  - Weekly-Notes
archive: false
summary: 
month: <% tp.date.now("MM"), offset?: number|string, reference?: string, reference_format?: string) %>
year: 
week: 
<%"---"%>

I started to look here for answers and trying to understand this article Inserting templates in the YAML section doesn't work in v1.4.5 but I am lost at this point.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

[Kinder]

are you wanting something like this?

<%*
// Define options for archive and status
const archiveOptions = ["true", "false"];
const statusOptions = ["Draft", "Published", "In Review", "Archived"];

// Use tp.system.suggester to let the user choose options
const archive = await tp.system.suggester(archiveOptions, archiveOptions);
const status = await tp.system.suggester(statusOptions, statusOptions);

// Other dynamic inputs
const created = await tp.date.now('YYYY-MM-DD[T]HH:mm');
const month = await tp.date.now("MM", "+30", tp.date.now("YYYY-MM-DD"), "YYYY-MM-DD");
const year = await tp.date.now("YYYY");
const week = await tp.date.now("WW");
const summary = "Add your summary"; // Static example, adjust as necessary

// Construct YAML metadata with dynamic inputs and selected options
const metaData = `---
created: ${created}
status: ${status}
tags:
  - Weekly-Notes
archive: ${archive}
summary: ${summary}
month: ${month}
year: ${year}
week: ${week}
---`;

tR += metaData;
%>

I wrote it this way because of the other post you were referring to.

[mjl]

This looks complicated, I’ll need some time to review and understand to implement. As I scan what you have developed, it seems it may be what I was looking to achieve. I do hope I can get my head wrapped around it as this would be great to streamline my workflow. When every minute counts… you know what I mean… thanks!

[mjl]

@Kinder

<%*
// Define options for archive and status
const archiveOptions = ["true", "false"];
const statusOptions = ["Draft", "Published", "In Review", "Archived"];

// Use tp.system.suggester to let the user choose options
const archive = await tp.system.suggester(archiveOptions, archiveOptions);
const status = await tp.system.suggester(statusOptions, statusOptions);

// Other dynamic inputs
const created = await tp.date.now('YYYY-MM-DD[T]HH:mm');
const month = await tp.date.now("MM", "+30", tp.date.now("YYYY-MM-DD"), "YYYY-MM-DD");
const year = await tp.date.now("YYYY");
const week = await tp.date.now("WW");
const summary = "Add your summary"; // Static example, adjust as necessary

// Construct YAML metadata with dynamic inputs and selected options
const metaData = `---
created: ${created}
status: ${status}
tags:
  - Weekly-Notes
archive: ${archive}
summary: ${summary}
month: ${month}
year: ${year}
week: ${week}
---`;

tR += metaData;
%>

Ok, so initially yes this works. I do believe I have much to lear from how to use or create meta data like for the month, year, and week values. I’m assuming that ${month} calls the “month” metadata field exsiting and prints the current month number.

[I-d-as]

As a side note, to add placeholder text asking questions, two of the lines could be adjusted to be:

tp.system.suggester(archiveOptions, archiveOptions, false, "Archive this note?");
const status = await tp.system.suggester(statusOptions, statusOptions, false, "What's the status?");

[mjl]

This worked beautifully, I never new there was such a thing that could be done as a tp.system.suggester(), in fact I didn’t know half of what is being shown here between you and @Kinder was even possible in Obsidian!

I’ll keep playing around with this for weekly, monthly, meeting, and action or project type notes. I can see that I can have much more control over automating than I thought was possible.

I’ll post my results soon.

[mjl]

Note for others, when attempting to add options for backlinks I’ve found that this needs to be handled differently. This came from when I was thinking how to create a “suggester” options list that I could reference any file that was tagged “Focus.” (I haven’t figure that out. Above my abilities)

I found this works for when you just have one person to mention, not sure how this could be possible with multiple persons.

// obviously there would be more constants than just "attendees," and for those like me, these are values from the YAML or metadata
const attendees = "person's name"

// you'll see to include a link to another note/file it must be within single-quotations and then within double brackets
const metaData = `---
attendees: '[[$attendees}]]'
---`

Note: if the link you reference using this method doesn’t exist you can click on the link to create it.

You could create a list of options I suspect, but not sure how this would work with getting the output to create backlinks.