Templater: How to get a list of md files styled with the data from YAML properties to retrieve a file name

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What I’m trying to do

Hello! I am creating a templater template to allow me to efficiently take literature notes. What I have been unable to do is to code a function to allow me to search within my biblatex references for the right reference to tag the note I am working on. To clarify what I mean, let me explain my setup briefly:

  • Biblatex references correspond each to a markdown file in a folder called “references” within my obsidian folder. The name of the markdown file is the same as that of the biblatex key.
  • These markdown files that correspond to biblatex references are all tagged in this way: tags: [reference/book, bibkey/22364ah, etc, etc], where reference is a tag used to identify the md note as a reference note, bookis the biblatex entry type (book, mvbook, inbook, etc.), and 22364ah is the actual biblatex key for the reference (and also the filename itself).
  • Following the format of the Obsidian citations plugin, my md notes corresponding to biblatex references all have within the YAML properties the usual biblatex fields such as author: ["Doe, John"], title: "The Greatest Book Ever", etc.

With this setup in mind, what I want is this: When creating a new permanent note with templater I want to be shown a list of my references, so that I can select one so that these are added as tags of the form bibkey/this, bibkey/that, etc to the permanent note I am creating.

Things I have tried

I was able to get partial success by using this code:

var annotation = (await tp.system.suggester((item) => item.basename, app.vault.getMarkdownFiles(), false, "Select source of annotation/citation")).basename;

With this, I would be shown a list of all md files in my vault so that I can pick up the right one to be assigned to variable annotation. Then, I use this variable to create the appropriate tag.

Although this function works, it has several limitations I would like to address:

  • It searches all the notes and not a specific subset of notes (I would rather search only those tagged “reference” or those in the “references” folder).
  • It only shows the note title, but it is difficult to choose the right note without more context. Ideally, I would like it to show some information related to a file from its YAML properties—say, the value for author, date and title (when they’re set) at the very minimum—to make it easier to know what file I am looking for.
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So, if you want to filter based on a tag you are going to have to integrate Dataview.

The following should produce what you want. Feel free to play around with the order of the the title, author, ect.

<%*
const dv = app.plugins.plugins.dataview.api;

const func = (item) => `${item.file.name}${item.author ? " - " + item.author : ""}${item.date ? " - " + item.date : ""}`;
const annotation = (await tp.system.suggester(func, dv.pages('#reference or "reference"'), false, "Select source of annotation/citation")).file.name;

tR += annotation
%>

Relevant links

P.S. It’s good form to not use var anymore. If the variable is unchanging, use const instead, and if it might change, use let instead. more info

1 Like
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Thank you so much for the code! It definitely works. I have zero knowledge of JavaScript, but for whatever reason Obsidian would complain that annotation was undefined when running the template, so I had to change const annotation to var annotation for it to run properly.

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