Whiteboards are very similar to pages at this point. They are the top of the hierarchy and can not be nested in the same way normal blocks can be nested.
If I understood it correctly whiteboards use the equivalence of Blocks/Page embeds to nest content.
This takes away possibility to preserve context when narrowing down ideas as the whiteboard acts as a separate page rather then a block in the context. Similarly in nested whiteboards there is only a backlink to the “parent” whiteboard which leads to loss of context.
Would it be possible to change the model in a way, that whiteboards are just normal blocks that can be used in the outline and can be nested?
Does this collide with the file based database approach of logseq?
Hello! Whiteboards behave like pages by design, but you can embed a whiteboard preview on a block. You will have to navigate to it to make edits though.
Similarly in nested whiteboards there is only a backlink to the “parent” whiteboard which leads to loss of context.
How would you imagine this work? Would you prefer nested whiteboards to work like editable groups of elements, or you just want to create a normal nested block with a whiteboard?
Exactly, “editable groups of elements” is a good description for it. A normal block is a element with content that has a group of elements attached. Hence if you treat a whiteboard as a general block, it could be part of a page in the parent/child sense and thus inherit all tags and relations.
A Page-like whiteboard would then just be a whiteboard with a name.
You could render the whiteboard like you render the embedded whiteboard, you can only edit if you open it.
From the database perspective, a whiteboard would be block with a group of child blocks, that have coordinates attached to arrange them in 2d, where a normal block can arrange its children only in a linear order.
The great part about this, would be that it does not make any difference if content is arranged as a list of blocks or a whiteboard. Queries would work exactly the same.
Please note, that I am fully aware that this may be impossible to implement with the current way of storing pages in markdown files, as whiteboards would have to live somewhere in the markdown.
All whiteboard elements are blocks, so queries should work fine. For example, this
{{query (property :logseq.tldraw.shape)}}
should return all of your shapes.
Shift clicking on the whiteboard title would also display the embedded blocks of the whiteboard on the sidebar, if you want to have an outliner view of your content (actual shapes won’t be visible, just blocks).