obsidian

Obsidian file creation date debacle and a solution

Obsidian is pretty reckless with file creation dates. If you modify a note in Obsidian, it updates the file creation date. This renders Dataview queries that rely on it useless. For an introduction to this issue, see this lengthy thread on the Obsidian forums. Workarounds There are a several solutions to this problem.

  1. YAML-based dates One can include a cdate (or similar) field in the note’s front matter and just direct the Dataview query against that, e.

Using fswatch to dynamically update Obsidian documents

Although I’m a relative newcomer to Obsidian, I like what I see, especially the templating and data access functionality - both that provided natively and through the Templater and Dataview plugins. One missing piece is the ability to dynamically update the YAML-formatted metadata in the frontmatter of Obsidian’s Markdown documents. Several threads on both the official support forums and on r/ObsidianMD have addressed this; and there seems to be no real solution.

Week functions in Dataview plugin for Obsidian

There are a couple features of the Dataview plugin for Obsidian that aren’t documented and are potentially useful. For the start of the week, use date(sow) and for the end of the week date(eow). Since there’s no documentation as of yet, I’ll venture a guess that they are locale-dependendent. For me (in Canada), sow is Monday. Since I do my weekly notes on Saturday, I have to subtract a couple days to point to them.