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Obsidian Bases

help.obsidian.md

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Re: Obsidian Bases

#41

Post by alberth »

joethei wrote: post #15
alberth wrote: post #11

This is slick. Does anyone know what JS library (presumably) they are using to display, filter, sort the table?

For the grammar: Lezer For the editor: CodeMirror Everything else is custom as we generally don't use existing frameworks and the large amount of baggage they carry. CodeMirror and Lezer we already used before Bases.

Any chance the entire table layout, filtering, etc will be open sourced?

I can see plenty of SaaS apps, especially indie made, that could benefit from such functionality.

Re: Obsidian Bases

#43

Post by Eji1700 »

raviisoccupied wrote: post #34

I’m an Obsidian user. I pay for Obsidian sync, and I love the philosophy behind their product. However, and I feel stupid for saying this, but I just find it confusing to use. It’s difficult for me to wrap my head around plugins, and understanding how it wants me to use it. For now, I’m just sticking to using it for daily notes, but I feel there’s so much I’m missing.

I think the one thing that really kills me is "consolidating" data is harder than it probably should be.

A simple thing I started with was "lets track movies and shows people recommend to me and I watch".

Ok, page for each rec, and then I can use props to tag them with things like if I watched them or not, who recommended them, genre's, and most importantly, if it's just for me, or also something the wife would enjoy.

Well....obviously I'd like to have a quick view on some page of the recommendations, and then ideally the recommendations that are tagged to include my wife so I can glance view between the two.

Thiiiiiis is not as easy as it should be. I'm writing this as some massive sql vquery on a couple billion records churns away. I'm not great (i'm much less impressive than that previous comment sounds in fact), but im way above beginner. I'm shocked at how hard this seems to be.

Tag searching is possible, but it gets ugly fast and sucks to constantly have to do and the bookmarks weren't clear.

Want to do queries, oh there's a plugin for that. Kinda odd but ok. Oh but wait those too are ALSO kinda of unintuitive (to me, i suspect it's a syntax and style I just haven't used to some extent), and why do I need to do a massive custom dataview query to just get what I feel should be built in? Why can't I just say "put in a query result for anything tagged with x and y", since that's what i'm typing out the hard way?

I haven't really "dug in" on this issue in awhile. I know they made some changes somewhat recently that allow some of this, but it seemed like it wasn't enough. It's baffling to me, because having a "dashboard" is the end goal of almost all these systems, and yet it seems so difficult in obsidian even for technically minded users. I can learn it, but god knows I don't need ANOTHER personal research project on my pile.

I'll admit that by griping about this i'm praying I get they "hey idiot" response below that explains how I should've done this.

Edit- To be clear, this new change certainly seems like it might help. It'll depend on how those views work in practice, and obviously appeals to me in my databasing mindset.

Re: Obsidian Bases

#44

Post by hu3 »

joethei wrote: post #15
alberth wrote: post #11

This is slick. Does anyone know what JS library (presumably) they are using to display, filter, sort the table?

For the grammar: Lezer For the editor: CodeMirror Everything else is custom as we generally don't use existing frameworks and the large amount of baggage they carry. CodeMirror and Lezer we already used before Bases.

Neat! Does it use a library like React? Or perhabs Lit?

Re: Obsidian Bases

#45

Post by nylonstrung »

raviisoccupied wrote: post #34

I’m an Obsidian user. I pay for Obsidian sync, and I love the philosophy behind their product. However, and I feel stupid for saying this, but I just find it confusing to use. It’s difficult for me to wrap my head around plugins, and understanding how it wants me to use it. For now, I’m just sticking to using it for daily notes, but I feel there’s so much I’m missing.

I highly recommend Siyuan as an alternative, it has many the best features from obsidian plugins included by default

Re: Obsidian Bases

#46

Post by nylonstrung »

I've used obsidian for years but if you want more db in your PKM then Siyuan is honestly a much better (albeit newer) option

It's also open source, unlike obsidian which is proprietary

Re: Obsidian Bases

#47

Post by andyferris »

kepano wrote: post #40
andyferris wrote: post #33

So where does the data "live"? I was looking at the syntax, it defines predicates for filters and views and so on, but I don't see the "rows". There is this `file.name` and `file.ext` thing - but where do you set them? What type of file does it point to? CSV? JSON? Something else? The docs seem incomplete.

The rows are individual Markdown files and the columns are YAML frontmatter properties in those files. There are some special properties prefixed by `file.` which are implicit to the file itself, e.g.`file.name` refers to the file name, and `file.ext` is the extension. The base views are defined as YAML in .base files or can be embedded in code blocks within a Markdown file. You can also export the rendered views to…

Hmm... so I can't use this to render and filter a table with 10k rows without having 10k markdown files?

If I understand correctly, the intention seems to be "curated list of links" which the user can sort, filter, etc when viewing. I guess that's cool, if you use Obsidian lots and have many notes/links - but when I clicked the article and saw the table I was hoping for a "dataframe" plugin for .md (much like how mermaid works, defined in a codeblock) that references a nearby CSV/JSON/etc file.

I often have a lot of .md files floating around "data" projects and a lightweight tabular renderer (with filtering, sorting, possibly editing) would be absolutely killer. Does such a thing exist already?

Re: Obsidian Bases

#48

Post by nxobject »

I hope more programs use ".base" files for database views – it runs a lot of workflows in Notion that would benefit from a diversity of implementations.

Re: Obsidian Bases

#50

Post by TheFuzzball »

nylonstrung wrote: post #45
raviisoccupied wrote: post #34

I’m an Obsidian user. I pay for Obsidian sync, and I love the philosophy behind their product. However, and I feel stupid for saying this, but I just find it confusing to use. It’s difficult for me to wrap my head around plugins, and understanding how it wants me to use it. For now, I’m just sticking to using it for daily notes, but I feel there’s so much I’m missing.

I highly recommend Siyuan as an alternative, it has many the best features from obsidian plugins included by default

Coming from Logseq... this looks ideal for me.
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