External API, converter or CLI tool

[vbifonixor]

Hi!

A quick suggestion for the datacore: wouldn't it be cool if datacore (or dataviews for that matter) had sql-like functionality to be available outside of obsidian as well? This could lead people to really use obsidian for input, but the vault content for API - like you could easily use a personal, self-hosted local database that could be easily synced across any amount of devices, also have a proper query language and on top of that edited with full power of obsidian plugin ecosystem.

It's just a suggestion, though:)

[vbifonixor]

Personally been looking for some solution like this to store my more structured personal data - sqlite lacks in synchronizing and device accessibility part, and full-blown databases like mongo need to be hosted somewhere, somehow backed up and require unnecessarily complicated tooling to work with for, say, just tracking some personal stats

And JSON or YAML lack in the querying department as well as capabilities of usable markdown editor inside:)

[xDovos]

read through issue #6 and don't forget that we need a solution that doesn't require others to know how to setup a sql database and how to maintain it. so the plugin would need to do everything for you without the need of users setting it up and populating it manually.
Obsidian is in the end just a browser that works on local markdown files and so we are bound to JS and it's libraries for plugins. it has to work on windows, linux, apple and android and has to be sync and backup friendly. if we change files from the vault outside of obsidian then the DB has to correctly update automatically and can't take ages for that.
that said i'm not a coder myself so i have little understanding on how complex and feasable it actually is. he even might be already be doing it after reading the other issue

[blacksmithgu]

It would be possible to make a daemon service that can be queried via a CLI or RPC that essentially just exactly implements the datacore search API - you would just need to mimic the file APIs that Obsidian provides. You could then treat it like a regular CLI and get fast queries for scripting.

I'm not currently looking at implementing this until the actual in-Obsidian UI is good but I think it would be a fun project.

[vbifonixor]

Well, right now i have a way to do something like that in my mind, but it can't be done outside of obsidian, yet the result can be accessible through it.
Basically, I create a template for templater plugin that would call dataview apis within a custom script with a dataview query, then get results as markdown, insert in the file created with this template, and then it would be available for parsing outside of obsidian.
It would be kind of a report generator.

Hm, now thinking of it I could even make some kind of a macros with quickadd and add a button to basically paste some dataview results into markdown