Caching of results/views?

[sheeley]

I have a number of dynamic views I've created to help track daily notes, tasks, etc.

I frequently have multiple notes open, like:

Daily Note	TODO	Meeting Note
list of notes created today	counts of all tasks grouped by state	meeting specific notes
list of tasks due/finished today	list of available tasks	outstanding tasks that relate to the meeting

Everything but the meeting specific notes is generated by Dataview. While I'm editing that content, it causes the view below it and the other two notes' views to constantly re-render.

I'd really love to have a multiple-phase approach, where each time a file is edited, I can update a materialized view of notes/tasks, so even if Obsidian forces dv to re-render, the query doesn't need to be run constantly.

Have any ideas on how this could work/if this is possible? I'm suspicious this may be a big challenge due to the architecture of Obsidian, but maybe I'm missing something.

[blacksmithgu]

Just to narrow down the issue, what problems are you seeing with frequent re-rendering (aside from obvious CPU time wasting)?

1. The view flickers / disappears for a second before re-appearing with new data?
2. It causes UI lag?
3. It causes input lag?
4. Something else annoying?

Also, are you using Live Preview or the regular Read/Edit modes?

I could see rendering lag being an issue, in which case we would need to revisit the react implementation of the views to make it more performant (which shouldn't be too bad).

However, the major improvement in this area would be to make queries be able to easily determine if they actually need to update - there are a lot of ways to fix this, but using content-hash-equality to check if metadata has actually changed or not on a per-file basis would be a simple option.

[blacksmithgu]

The view swapping (double buffering which div to render to and swapping hidden status) has not yielded any fruits - I think the issue is a little deeper in how tables are rendered. Maybe an API change would be easier to make smooth.

[sheeley]

Any way I can help?

[blacksmithgu]

I'm thinking the best idea here is to actually go full virtual DOM and have the API generate a virtual DOM that is rendered all at once, and then updated via a diff. This is probably doable via preact, but I'll have to break the return types of the render APIs to do it unfortunately.

[blacksmithgu]

Implementing that seems hard, but if you have ideas for a cleaner looking render API while we're at it I'd be happy to hear about it.

[sheeley]

I think I'm too ignorant of the internals to have much thoughtful input currently, but if you'd like a tester or for me to play with something a bit more tangible, I'd be happy to!

[sheeley]

Ooh, found an instance where this redraw is actually painful. If you are low on a tasklist and complete one, it jumps you back to the top because the whole view re-renders.

[blacksmithgu]

Yes, I think the scrolling issue when DataviewJS views re-render is probably the most annoying part.