Obsidian Aggregate Content Inside Heading

[Braden1996]

Hello 👋

I have a journal of daily notes, named in the format 2022-06-01. Each note varies in structure, but often the same heading appears (e.g. ## work or ## general). I'd like to aggregate the headed content from each note, say in the past week, such that I can read a continuous feed of that particular topic.

At the moment I have this, but it's quite slow and the rendering isn't ideal (lots of newline whitespace):

const pages = await Promise.all(
    dv
    .pages('"01 Journal"')
    .filter(p => dv.date(p.file.name) >= dv.date('today').startOf('day') - dv.duration("7 d"))
    .map(page => new Promise(async (resolve, reject) => {
        const content = await dv.io.load(page.file.path);
        resolve({ link: page.file.link, content});
    }))
);

const dailySectionsPage = pages.map(({
    link,
    content
}) => ({
    link,
    content: content
        .split('## ')
        .filter(section => section.startsWith('General\n\n'))
        .map(section => section.split('General\n\n')[1].trim())
        .filter(Boolean)
}));

const output = dailySectionsPage.map(({content}) => content).join('')
console.log(output)
dv.el('div', output)

Is there a better strategy here? Perhaps a way to get the block embed link for each line in a section?

[Braden1996]

This feature request seems related: #30

[AB1908]

Are you trying to rearrange file content or just want an arranged view of the metadata?

[AB1908]

Hello there

General Kenobi!

Anyhow, is my understanding correct to say that you want the equivalent of:

![[2022-06-01#general]]]
![[2022-06-02#general]]]
![[2022-06-03#general]]]

?

[Braden1996]

Very close, but this captures the heading itself (which leaves me with #general repeated for each entry)

[AB1908]

Woops, messed up the embed syntax. Can you remove the ^s?

[Braden1996]

Yep - this embed captures the heading for each day. I'd like to try have it only capture the content.

[AB1908]

Content capture is tricky. DV was never built for something like that. Instead it focuses on manipulating metadata. Getting around this manually won't scale well either.

[autolyticus]

Hello!

This does seem quite related to #30, specifically, I think me and @Braden1996 have fundamental use-cases here that are almost identical!

This kind of workflow is great for enabling me to focus on the context of the notes for my intermittent journaling/logs, instead of which day it is. The day is still important of course, but my dream is to have Dataview enable all the daily and weekly notes to be nothing more than a Dashboard or a database view into the actual content which is stored in the more relevant notes.

Philosophy and dreaming aside, as mentioned above, I do understand that Dataview itself is intended more for "data" and not the "content" itself, but it would be great if you could shed some light on whether the new capabilities and APIs as part of the recent superpowers to sections would make this use-case a bit more performant and easier. (And if it's now possible to get rid of the redundant headers that the approach above generates)

[AB1908]

Sorry for not getting around to the initial request but the cleanest way to do this is to query file.list and then filter by section I think. Same goes for @Braden1996's request though I can't recall why I thought it was tricky two months ago.

[Braden1996]

This strategy somewhat works, but isn't particularly robust. In particular, it only capture list items and not the entire section contents. Also, additional work is required to handle indents. I believe this plugin may be more appropriate for achieving out needs: https://github.com/nothingislost/obsidian-query-control

const sectionTitle = "General"
const pageDirectory = '"01 Journal"'

const pages = await Promise.all(
    dv
    .pages(pageDirectory)
    .filter(p => dv.date(p.file.name) >= dv.date('today').startOf('day') - dv.duration("7 d"))
);

const listItems = pages.map(page => page.file.lists.values).flat()
const sectionListItems = listItems.filter(list => list.section.subpath === sectionTitle)
const sectionListItemStrings = sectionListItems.map(list => list.text)

dv.list(sectionListItemStrings)

[AB1908]

Yup, dataview isn't going to retrieve non metadata contents but you can get around that by using the Obsidian API and reading file contents. You seem comfortable with JS so I'd recommend giving that a shot as well but if you'd rather use NIL's plugin, go for it.

[autolyticus]

Wow this is great, thanks a tonne @Braden1996 for helping clarify.

@AB1908, I'm really grateful for how responsive and helpful you are around the community. I really appreciate it, thanks!

[AB1908]

Haha happy I could help! This is my favorite plugin and it finally got me to look into JavaScript haha.