Make dv.pages accept link objects without requiring a string transformation

[tzhouhc]

Sometimes users would transliterate FROM [[#]] into dv.pages(dv.current().file.link), which doesn't work and would require a + "" to coerce into string. Perhaps dv.pages could just accept the three kind of link-related fields from a page object (by doing a type check and then just translating the link to appropriate string?):

• .file.link would behave as with DQL, i.e. use all files linking into the page as source. (this should be reasonable since .file.name would already select the file itself and is unambiguous)
• .file.inlinks would behave just like the above.
• .file.outlinks would behave like FROM outgoing() and use all files linked from current page as source.

Arguments could be made that these behaviors are non-obvious. I believe as the two latter fields are arrays, they wouldn't be expected to behave at all in dv.pages anyway, so there shouldn't be anything broken by this sort of change.

Just a small thought.

[blacksmithgu]

It is not breaking to support these use cases (since they don't work at all right now), though my concern is that the more intuitive behavior for a list of links would be to map each of them to their metadata, instead of treating them like incoming/outgoing links.

Maybe it is worth adding a generic dv.from() API endpoint which exactly copies FROM ?

[tzhouhc]

I think we actually agree on what the intuitive behavior is, I'm just not elaborating it right. If note A and note B link to note C, then running dv.pages(dv.current().file.inlinks) should give me a data array with note A and note B in them.

(Which I guess means links should be equivalent to referring to the file itself, so for consistency's sake dv.pages(file.link) should be equivalent to dv.page(file.name)

dv.from would be cool since I believe there are currently cases where they differ slightly -- e.g. with boolean operators.

My ideal world would be one where dv.from behaves like FROM, and dv.pages is smart about the input based on types, though really links are the only thing where it's a bit weird for me right now.

[tzhouhc]

That and a lot of users learn dvjs by translating their dql, which tends to be pretty sophisticated at that point, so dv.from would help with the transition.

[blacksmithgu]

That makes sense - I will add link support to dv.pages() and dv.page(), and implement dv.from() which actually implements the incoming/outgoing links functionality of the query language FROM.