Custom Obsidian Templater Daily Notes Template With Dynamic Linking

I’ve recently started using Obsidian’s Daily Notes feature to keep track of what I’ve been doing. From the start I wanted to use Templater to dynamically create my daily notes such that each note to link to the previous one. And I’m not talking a simple -1d offset. I’m talking properly analysing the available files to then pick the most recent one akin to a Singly Linked List

⚠️ First thing first, this isn’t a Templater tutorial so head to the documentation to learn how to do this yourself.

🧑‍💻 Go here for the complete code

Implementation

Firstly, let’s scrape the file system through the app.vault api and exclude any notes without Daily Notes folder and let’s also exclude today’s (hard-coded for now) notes name:

  files = app.vault.getMarkdownFiles()
    .filter(file => file.path.includes("Daily Notes"))
    .filter(file => !file.path.includes("2022-08-01"));

Next we’ll evaluate how long ago the file was created based on it’s basename

  now = Date.now().valueOf();

  files = files.map(file => {
    file.parsed_time = Date.parse(file.basename);
    return file;
  });

Finally we’ll sort the array and select the most recent one

  files = files.sort((a, b) => a.parsed_time < b.parsed_time);

Template

Within a template we just call:

<% tp.user.tag_previous_daily_note(tp.file.title, "YOUR DAILY NOTE PATH") %>

Complete Files

tag_previous_daily_note.js

function tag_previous_daily_note(filename, path) {

  files = app.vault.getMarkdownFiles().filter(file => file.path.includes(path)).filter(file => !file.path.includes(filename));

  now = Date.now().valueOf();

  files = files.map(file => {
    file.parsed_time = Date.parse(file.basename);
    return file;
  });

  files = files.sort((a, b) => a.parsed_time < b.parsed_time);

  return files[0].basename;
}

module.exports = tag_previous_daily_note;

daily_notes_template.md

---
created: <% tp.file.creation_date() %>
tags: daily/<% tp.date.now("YYYY/MMMM") %>
---

# <%tp.file.title%>
---

**Previous** [[<% tp.user.tag_previous_daily_note(tp.file.title,"Daily Notes")%>]]

---

<% tp.file.cursor(1) %>