Query for pages that does not exist as files

[tonyxiao]

In my notes I often write [[People/NameOfPerson]] if I just met someone, however I won't always have much to say more about the person and therefore they won't yet exists as actual files on disk.

I want to find a list of all the pages that start with a particular prefix (e.g. People/), regardless of whether or not it exists as pages on disk, can that be done via data view?

[blacksmithgu]

This is doable by directly trawling the dataview index in DataviewJS, though not using normal Dataview queries - you essentially aggregate all file.outlinks links for every page and then filter down to ones which start with your desired prefix:

dv.list(dv.pages().file.outlinks.distinct().where(l => l.path.startsWith("People") && !dv.index.pages.has(l.path)));

[tonyxiao]

whoa that is awesome. though seems a little bit inefficient to aggregate over every file. Does data view have access to the list from Obsidian's Open file menu? It would appear that obsidian already internally maintain an index.

[blacksmithgu]

Dataview maintains an in-memory index of a lot of file metadata, including all file links (in and out), so this is relatively performant up to maybe ~100,000 notes. It might take a second or two to compute for very large vaults, though if it gets to slow you can go a layer lower and directly traverse Obsidian's own link cache which should work for very very large vaults.

[ghost]

based on this, am I correct that pages that have not yet been created, don't appear in a file's outlinks?