How do you migrate or upgrade templates for your common notes?

[tom-rm-meyer-ISST]

Description

Templates evolve over time. I heavily use templates to define structures and metadata on specific "note types" such as meetings, thoughts, etc.

Please find below an example of a template I use for a paper (staring point was a kit of bryan jenkins) . I often find out new stuff (like getting more familiar with the dataview plugin) and update my templates accordingly. In the paper case, I for example created an export macro from my citavi notes to my paper notes and wanted additional fields to be added automatically.

I'm wondering if someone of you has stumbled across the same issues like my common use cases:

• I added a metadata property to my note type and now want to update it on all notes of that type.
• I fully reworked a template and now want to put the old data in the new one.
• I used a template in a particiular context and now would love to use it more contexts.

In the example below, I switched a datatype and increased the version. Today I realized that I was pretty stupid as I also didn't add a property template-name or directly a template-scheme. This, and additional properties are not handled by command "Templater: Replace templates in the active file". I then migrate manually for the needed files only as follows:

1. turn on "source mode"
2. put my curser to the start
3. insert the template
4. take over old values to the new template (even if they are named the same)
5. delete the overhead created

I recently introduced myself to database migrations with liquibase. It allows to define a changelog with some kind of changesets to apply specific changes for a version. This would be great, even if I would need to define each migration in e.g. a python script doing the manipulations (e.g. in steps like 1) apply to notes with criteria, 2) apply these changes to metadata, structure, etc.

Similar issues

I found similar issues. E.g. this reddit thread described a similar issue with bulk editing metadata, that may be solved with the obisidian-metadata. I'll give it a try for metadata migrations.

As I sparesely find well-working solutions and a user in this reddit thread said it would be a great feature, I wonder if someone started working on these kind of topics more automatically. Maybe I'm also just abusing templates or am unaware of tooling. Maybe there are some great samples for Markdown migrations.

Example Template: Paper

---

template-version: "5"
tags:

• paper
  publish: true
  aliases:
  type:
• paper
• "&"
  status: open
  created: <%tp.date.now()%>
  updated: <%tp.date.now()%>
  Author:
  DOI:
  author-keywords:
  publisher:
  journal:
  conference:
  publish-date:
  reviewed-on-date: <%tp.date.now()%>

---

Title: <%tp.file.title%>

Citation

Hypothesis / Research Questions:

Methodology:

Definitions

TABLE term, definition
WHERE by = [[<%tp.file.title%>]]
SORT term ASC

Result(s):

Summary of key points:

Notes

Context:

How this article relates to other work in the field; how it ties in with key issues and findings by others, including yourself

Significance:

to the field; in relation to your own work

Important Figures and/or Tables:

brief description; page number

Other Comments:

Cited References

to follow up on (cite those obviously related to your topic AND any papers frequently cited by others because those works may well prove to be essential as you develop your own work

[edmooredop]

Hey there, I'm also sniffing around the same problem. I've written a python script that externally updates all my notes with the latest template version, but the issue I've discovered is that parts of the template that contain Javascript (I have a dynamic link to a fastmail IMAP label based on the note name for example) won't apply without manually running "Template: Replace templates in current file". So it's a teeny bit messy.

I agree that some sort of functionality to manage updating templates would be a great addition to the plugin, although I'm at the limits of my skillset at this point so will have to hope some smarter folk take a swing at it!