20 January 2023

Obsidian: Previous Week Review

I’ve been playing with Obsidian over the last few months, and aside from some minor UI changes (via CSS) it’s been pretty good!
However, I found that I wanted to see what I was up to last week in the context of what I’m doing today.
Here’s how I did it.

My primary use of Obsidian is taking notes through the week. In general, I do work for different customers each day of the week, and I find that I’ve forgotten what I was doing last week, OR I did some work for that client on a different day than normal.
I thought it’d be nice to have some way of summarising the last week of work to remind me.

Dataview

Obsidian has a plugin called Dataview which exposes a Javascript API and allows querying and advanced data visualisations over your notes.
You can do basic stuff of the SQL vein like table file from "incident" which shows all your notes where you had an #incident tag.
There is also a much more advanced Javascript implementation allowing you to add arbitrary code to get what you want.

Summary View V1

My first go at the summary view uses the SQL approach. Essentially, I ask it to get me a list of the files from the last 7 days which have occurrences of the tags in the current page in them.

e.g. The current page has #incident from above, so my summary would show any other files in the last week that have that tag.

--```dataview
table file.tags as Tags 
where file.ctime > (this.file.ctime - dur(1 week)) and (file.ctime < this.file.ctime) and any(file.tags, (x) => contains(this.file.tags, x))
--```

--```dataview
table file.tags as Tags 
where file.ctime > (this.file.ctime - dur(1 week)) and (file.ctime < this.file.ctime) and any(file.tags, (x) => contains(this.file.tags, x))
--```

However, you might notice an issue: It only gets 7 days back. For Monday, this is fine as it’ll get the whole week prior, but for Friday, it’ll only get back to Friday… That’s not quite what I want.

Summary View V2

I had to delve into JS to achieve what I wanted here, as I couldn’t find another way of extracting and comparing the dates with the start of their weeks, etc

//```dataviewjs
let fileDate = dv.date(dv.current().file.name.split(" ")[0])
let startOfWeek = fileDate?.startOf('week')
let fileTags = dv.current().file.tags

let mySource = dv.pages().filter(x => {
  const d = dv.date(x.file.name.split(" ")[0])
  if (!d || x.file.name === dv.current().file.name) return false
  const dStartOfWeek =  d.startOf('week')
  const diff = startOfWeek - dStartOfWeek
  const withinDateRange = diff >= 0 && diff <= dv.duration('7 days')
  const hasMatchingTags = x.file.tags.some(t => fileTags.includes(t))
  return withinDateRange && hasMatchingTags
}).map(x => [x.file.link, x.file.tags])

dv.table(['File', 'Tags'], mySource)
//```

//```dataviewjs
let fileDate = dv.date(dv.current().file.name.split(" ")[0])
let startOfWeek = fileDate?.startOf('week')
let fileTags = dv.current().file.tags

let mySource = dv.pages().filter(x => {
  const d = dv.date(x.file.name.split(" ")[0])
  if (!d || x.file.name === dv.current().file.name) return false
  const dStartOfWeek =  d.startOf('week')
  const diff = startOfWeek - dStartOfWeek
  const withinDateRange = diff >= 0 && diff <= dv.duration('7 days')
  const hasMatchingTags = x.file.tags.some(t => fileTags.includes(t))
  return withinDateRange && hasMatchingTags
}).map(x => [x.file.link, x.file.tags])

dv.table(['File', 'Tags'], mySource)
//```

The Result

Looks pretty shiny to me!

Tags: obsidian