Future-Proofing and Dataview

[selfire1]

One of the incentives of Obsidian is how it's future proof. Even if Obsidian development stops, you have your files locally, in Markdown format.

Dataview stands somewhat in a tension to that future-proof notetaking. Relying heavily on queries to organise your notes will result in a gibberish that can't be leveraged easily if Obsidian (or Dataview) stops being developed.

Hopefully, neither of those will happen but I think there is still a certain weariness for people who care about Future-Proofing to use all of Dataview capabilities.

One idea that could combat that tension, would be to implement the conversion from Dataview to Markdown. The ability to turn a Dataview table into a Markdown table and dv lists into Markdown lists.

This might also help with performance: non-changing dataview queries, like "Books read 2021" could be turned into a static markdown table to reduce the amount of processing that needs to happen while providing future-proof notes.

It could also provide powerful on-the-fly list and table making.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this specific implementation or other ideas to use Dataview while having future-proof notes.

[therealfakemoot]

Here's my take on this. Instead of just permanently "burning" a query into a page in-place, give queries the ability to target a ^block-id. dataview could then write the output of the query to that block, either one-off, every refresh interval or uh...when you run a Command Palette action? Mostly thinking about code reuse, which means I'd super duper love to see view() updated with burn parameters too.

[selfire1]

That's a great idea, love it. Having dataview write into an id both provides future-proof notes and exciting new workflow options.

[AB1908]

#42 is related

[blacksmithgu]

Block IDs sadly do not work for more complex views (anything with grouping involved) since they cannot span across multiple markdown elements; they may be fine for straightforward lists and tables, though.

[therealfakemoot]

Yeah this is absolutely a "perfect world" description of the feature. As long as we are not purely restricted to in-place burnouts, have some reusability, I'm sure it'll be great.

[blacksmithgu]

You could maybe actually get around this by two block IDs (one to start the output and one to end it), like ^blah and ^blah-end.

[blacksmithgu]

See issue #42 for the feature request for this - which essentially advocates for being able to freely convert dataview output into Markdown at any level of granularity.

I think #42 will cover the most common concerns - namely, being able to convert all Dataview blocks into plain markdown (replacing existing queries, adding underneath, or potentially replacing block IDs); that way if you ever migrate away from Obsidian or Dataview you will retain all of your existing query output, and you can additionaly use dataview output in Obsidian Publish or in other markdown tooling you may use.