Sections as fields?

Any chance of having support for using markdown sections (i.e. content under a header) being used as fields (with multiline values and markdown rendering)?

This is different from #23, in that the question here is one of using the content of a section (including nested sections) as fields rather than treating the items themselves as records (as in #23). (Likewise, it’d actually be nice to be able to use standardized block names as fields; e.g. to pull out the ^thesis block of a file and treat it as a field for that file’s row, to get a nice grid of chapter thesis statements.)

Anyway, I ask because I’ve recently found myself wanting to display the contents of various note files (structural work on chapters for a book) in consolidated form. For example, to display all the intros or all the exercises, and be able to see which parts of what chapters are fleshed out or not.

(Even more awesome would be if you could edit in place or at least have a way to click and open the relevant note+section.)

Anyway, I’ve been sort of kludging a solution using hovering over various links, and using section titles that are links to chapter titles and whatnot, and been wishing I had a better way. I was thinking of maybe implementing some sort of query layer over the markdown, and then I stumbled across a reference to this plugin. 😉

(Anyway, I totally understand if this is something completely out of scope. Just thought I’d ask.)

[zachdaniel]

For anyone else that ends up here, I used the recommendation above to build a dataviewjs block that brings in the list of quotes of my files tagged w/ people (which use a template that adds a quotes section using the comment delimiters I refer to in the snippet:

let quotesPromises = dv.pages("#people").map(async (p) => {
  const link = p.file.link;
  return await dv.io.load(p.file.link).then((contents) => {
    const indexOfQuotes = contents.indexOf("<!-- quotes -->");
    if (indexOfQuotes > 0) {
	  const quoteStart = contents
	    .substr(indexOfQuotes + 16)
		
	  const quotes = quoteStart.substr(0, quoteStart.indexOf("<!-- end quotes -->")).trim();
	  
	  if (quotes === "") {
	    return [];
	  } else {
	    return quotes.split(">").map(q => q.trim()).filter((q) => q !== "").map((quote) => [p.file.link, quote]);
	  }
	} else {
	  return []
	}
  });
});

let quotes = (await Promise.all(quotesPromises)).flat().filter((q) => q.length > 0);

dv.table(["Author", "Quote"], quotes);

Which yields something like this:

[blacksmithgu]

Interesting idea. I am planning on adding a “embed query”, where you can query for sections / blocks / whatnot and they will render similarly to if you had done a bunch of manual ![[]] embed statements, which will get part of what you want.

Editing in place sounds cool, though would be difficult (dataview generally works where you write the query in edit mode, and view the result dynamically in preview mode). It might be possible via a custom view (i.e., a “query” view where you type in a query at the top and you can view results at the bottom), though that would be further in the future.