How to use Dataview and Templater to run JavaScript in Obsidian for automating task management

Sun, 16 Jan 2022 16:30:22 +0100

TIL how to run JavaScript in @obsdmd. A friend of mine had an interesting use case: He had a long reading list from his studies, and wanted to use Obsidian to decide what he could read given a certain amount of time.

TL;DR: Here’s the script. And here’s the end result:

Requires: Obsidian. The Dataview and Templater plugins. Also requires a separate markdown page for every chapter or bite-sized section of the book or course, with the metadata time_required in the YAML frontmatter.

Why Dataview? Dataview can parse that frontmatter, grab the value for time_required, and return a list of pages and links. There is a Dataview Query Language, but dataviewjs is more extensible.

Why Templater? I initially wanted to write a script within a dataviewjs block, but:

Dataview results are only rendered in Preview mode (which I don’t spend much time in)
I hate testing JavaScript within Obsidian.

Instead, I created a folder scripts within my vault and selected it as the “user scripts folder” in Templater settings. Then, I created a script, returnStudyOptions.js. Here’s the gist for that.

In a new note, I typed <% tp.user.returnStudyOptions(tp, 60) %>. This line calls the script I created and also passes 60 minutes as the time available.

I selected “Templater: Replace templates in the active file” from the Command Pane, which runs the script and replaces the line with the script’s returned value, which looks something like this:

I also assigned a hotkey to for replacing the template, for ease of use. That’s it! I thought this was a fun way to learn how to use JavaScript in Obsidian. Thanks to @ealameda for the use case!

Task Management on Nicole van der Hoeven

How to use Dataview and Templater to run JavaScript in Obsidian for automating task management