Tag: #Obsidian

Two or three weeks back I wrote about Bases, the new shiny feature in Obsidian. Since then I’ve done some investigation and prototyping to see what it can do and very quickly ran into what for me is a potential showstopper.

As far as I can tell, all the views and displays you build within Bases are driven by the properties you assign to a note, or by tags. Because I built a lot of my notes for use with Dataview, I made extensive use of the custom data element – text followed by a double colon, and built a lot of my templates around those custom data elements.

Some of those custom data elements are easy to translate to properties and takes minimal effort. Others like my book catalog, which runs to nearly two hundred documents, need not just the template changed (the easy part), but migration of all those entries. Based on some of my initial tinkering that’s at least a half day just for the books folder. After that I have to update all the Dataview Queries or rebuild them in Bases.

My inclination at the moment is to leave things as they are and wait for Bases to evolve and give me a compelling reason to invest that migration time.

It’s been a couple of weeks since I posted here, and there’s been a lot happening in my world. Some of it I’ll cover in a May retrospective next week. Some of it won’t get covered either because I’m not ready to talk about it yet, or because there are other people involved and they don’t need my comments, perceptions, or thoughts on a subject where, at best I have half the story.

So, what is bright and shiny this week. Obsidian Bases. What?

if you’re part of the early access program with Obsidian, release 1.9.1 includes a new core plugin called Bases. It allows you to turn your vault of notes into a database. My first thought was, so what. I have the Dataview plugin that allows me to write queries on all the notes in the vault and build results for display.

That’s true but when I looked at how the Base syntax is structured and some of the functionality in the road map, I came more excited. The Obsidian development team fleshed out and improved the original Canvas concept really quickly to the point where I use canvas a lot of time. I expect they’ll do the same with Bases over the next few months and in the meantime I’ll tinker around and see what it can do.