How to create page with properties? Page templates?

[onkeltem]

I cannot seem to find how to create pages with properties. Is there a way to?

Also I have a list of block templates but I don’t want them to be blocks anymore, I want every block like - book, project, program, person - to be pages instead. Can I apply templates there?

Also currently I distinguish blocks by tags, e.g books go with #r/book tag, programs - with #r/program. Now if I start making pages for them, how to organize them structurally the same way, using this hierarchy? Should I type manually something like r/program/The full name of a program I'm writing about?

[mentaloid]

Too many and seemingly unrelated questions. Sounds like you are:

• somewhat disoriented
  • Logseq’s multiple options and support of diverse workflows can cause that.
  • Should probably discuss your needs before discussing a detailed implementation of the ideal workflow.
• overengineering your approach before accumulating enough experience
  • Previous experience in other applications is both:
    • positive: Provides some familiarity for not starting from blank.
    • negative: Makes it difficult to properly grasp or adopt some of Logseq’s principles.

@onkeltem

Should I type manually something like r/program/The full name of a program I'm writing about?

Only if you have nothing better to do with your life.

• Deep namespaces cause depression. Shortening them:
  • saves some typing
  • but doesn’t address the actual problem
• #r/program is a bad choice for a tag, specifically the cryptic r/ prefix
  • After learning page properties (see below), should move both r and program into properties.
    • This will also align with the coming database version.

@onkeltem

Can I apply templates there?

Yes, templates can be applied for pages of various entities. They:

• speed-up the workflow, by reusing repetitive structures
• don’t solve any other problem
  • In theory they achieve consistency, but not in practice, because they don’t enforce it.

@onkeltem

I cannot seem to find how to create pages with properties. Is there a way to?

From documentation:

Page properties are defined by putting them into the first block of the page

[onkeltem]

I’m designing a new database for notes taking. I started with enumerating entities that I’m gonna comment on. All of them were blocks initially.

For example:

• resources (short: r)
  • book
  • program
• projects (short: p)
  • article
  • program

I could have have type-properties to distinguish them, but I opted to just tags: #r/book, #p/program. They are much easier to enter, they don’t allocate additional line i.e. don’t make blocks taller. I also don’t have problems with learning what is what: r - resources, p - projects, that’s fine.

I place those type-tags right before the title, e.g.:

• #r/book **Sönke Ahrens - How to Take Smart Notes - 2017**

I was quite happy with blocks until I realized that all such entities are better to be pages.

So now I’m thinking about placing those pages on disk.

A block like the one I just provided would turn into a page:

• r/book/Sönke Ahrens - How to Take Smart Notes - 2017

So as you see I have to keep the path (the type) inside the title.

[mentaloid]

• Don’t squeeze extra info inside the title.
  • A book (or any other entity) can have many more properties that could ever fit in a title.
  • The title should be plain, unless two books have identical titles.
• If you want to make your future self a favor, make your database a proper one like this:

  • 

  • 

[onkeltem]

@mentaloid

The title should be plain, unless two books have identical titles.

Yeah, the identical titles issue.

For blocks:

• By looking at a block title, I cannot say what it is - an article, a book, a project etc

For pages:

• How to store them, taking in to account they all live in one folder in Logseq.
• By looking at a page title, I cannot say what it is - an article, a book, a project etc

This is a reason why namespacing seems to be required.

[mentaloid]

• Normally entities appear within some context, which is almost always enough to tell their type.
• When entities of different types appear within the same context:
  • should firstly check why that happened
    • could be a bad design
  • if the mix is valid, should either:
    • filter them
      • This is easy with queries, thanks to the properties.
    • simply hover on the one in question
      • This will show not only its type, but its whole page along with all its info.
  • the benefits from avoiding the noise of extra info far outweigh the rare need for some extra action
    • That extra action (query, hover etc.) usually happens anyway, to cover other needs.
• For identical titles, should pick a unique prefix that excludes yet another collision in the future.
  • It makes more sense to have a few prefixed titles, than to apply unnecessary prefixes everywhere.

[onkeltem]

• In Logseq I cannot create two pages with the identical title
  • If I enter [[page title]] - it will just link the existing page.
  • If I use Ctrl-K search and select “create page” from there, it anyway just opens the existing page.
• So I will have to make titles unique anyway, say by prefixing them
  • which implies the existence of a workflow of adding those prefixes, as this must not be random
    • one possible example I described earlier - prefixes by entity types that reduce the probability of titles clashes
• Linking entities becomes difficult as when I start type - a lot of unrelated stuff will be suggested
  • Say if I want to write a Dune book note I don’t want to see Dune movie, whatever prefix of postfix it might have to workaround the obvious conflict in this case.
• Using queries to output additional information from the field is fine, but I wouldn’t like to start writing queries just every time I need to learn what Dune is - a book or a movie.

if the mix is valid, should either / filter them / This is easy with queries, thanks to the properties.

If real folders were not sort of ignored, they could serve a good service for base pages classification.

Consider a page “Dune” located in r/books.
It could add an auto-property like $path with the value of r/books/.

1. We could have then used them in the queries.
2. We could opt to seeing those properties in lists of objects: r/books Dune
3. It could also be used in autocompletion: the pages could be separated/grouped by those paths in the suggestion list.

[mentaloid]

Mixing identically named things is not healthy.

• This should be very rare within a single graph. Such rare cases:
  • can be disambiguated with namespaces (usually just one level)
  • but should not enforce the namespaces to every single entity
• If the chances for confusion are actually high, should rather use a different graph for each type of entities.
  • Reducing the probability is not as good as making it zero.
  • Here is the criterion:
    • If you are annoyed of seeing something appearing in a search or query, it should not be in this graph to begin with.
      • The reason to be in a graph is exactly in order to appear (in auto-complete and everywhere).
      • Graphs happen to be real folders.
• Namespaces are not classes, they are contexts.
  • A database of books should not contain movies.
    • book/Dune, movie/Dune and generally type/title are bad choices for names
      • Knowledge-wise, the movie is the adaptation of the book, so plain Dune should be the book, while the movie should have a longer name (e.g. Dune/movie)
        • This may cover many cases, but not all.
      • Information-wise, the right reason to include both these instances in the same graph, is if their context is Dune.
        • In that case they should be named Dune/book and Dune/movie
          • Just like you already did:

            @onkeltem

            Say if I want to write a Dune book note I don’t want to see Dune movie

            • Exactly because in this case you wanted to use both in the same context.

[onkeltem]

If I place movies and books in different graphs, how can I then reflect on both movies and books?
Is it possible to reference different external graphs from another graph?
Continuing with the example, how to reference both “Dune” book and “Dune” movie while writing a review in this case?

More generally, I consume:

• articles
• books
• courses
  • lessons
• movies
• lectures

and produce:

• articles
• books
• programs
• systems
• podcasts
• audiobooks
• videos

Currently I imagine all those be in one graph.

---

Going back to the initial question of page properties: I see now how props get applied in the “first block” — which is actually the root frontmatter block (though not YAML, but anyway). Another smart architectural finding!

---

My current take on this:

1. Use templates like this:

type: r/book
template: r/book

OR

template: r/book
#r/book

2. Use this template to make book pages.

Title: r/book/Frank Herbert — Dune
type: r/book

So I’ll get a sort of double input which I should maintain manually: the type thing r/book is getting doubled (As I noted above, it could have been avoided if Logseq used folders.)

An argument for using tag #r/book instead of the type-field is that I don’t need to write queries to list all the books in my graph: I just need to click the tag.

---

One more point. A good way to reduce duplicates even further would be using authors, release years, editions in the titles.

I understand, that it’s gonna be more difficult to fetch those different bits. But that depends on a goal of the database. Say if I don’t need to capture all the real-world dependencies of all possible objects then I wouldn’t probably be bothered with allocating field storages for things I don’t care.

[onkeltem]

@mentaloid I decided to move all type-tags to frontmatter, as you advised. It was not clear to me why it was a bad thing to use tags in the text until I started writing queries.

The problem with “just tags” is that they’re read from the entire document, including nested blocks. So if a block is marked with a #note tag, then all its parents are as well! Which of course makes querying by tags ineffective.

This will also affect references (links). Before, I was going to use linking “unconstrainedly” i.e. just put links where they are better fit to. But it blurs the dependencies as well. So I’ll switch to a field instead, like refs, which I’ll be using to put essential links. E.g: link to a book (or books) being commented.

[Siferiax]

@onkeltem

So if a block is marked with a #note tag, then all its parents are as well!

How do you mean this? Because that’s not technically true.
The reverse is (sort of) true. That is, a child inherits the links of its parent.

If we query for references to note.
Then something like

• a book [[note]]
  • details

Will have in the parent block :block/refs to the note page
And in the child block :block/refs will not have this, but in :block/path-refs it does.

In reverse then,

• some header
  • a book [[note]]

Will have no :block/refs for its parent block, but will have :block/refs in its child block to the note page.

(I’m use :block/refs specifically here, so as to say what is actually stored in the back end, not so much what Logseq shows. Because what Logseq shows vs. what is stored has led to confusion in the past I noticed.)

[etc]

@onkeltem

• By looking at a block title, I cannot say what it is - an article, a book, a project etc

@onkeltem

• By looking at a page title, I cannot say what it is - an article, a book, a project etc

Using the icon:: property or including an icon in the title could help.
See also option with custom css by @alex0 here: alexl/for-logseq: Various stuff for Logseq - Codeberg.org

[mentaloid]

Too many details for me to closely follow, so I’m going to give one more general advice, although expressed as an example.

• Consider a typical block that deserves 20 associations:
  • wrong approach: place them all as 20 tags in the block itself
    • That would make for the most informative but useless block possible.
      • Information overload is practically no different from noise.
  • right approach: distribute them like this:
    • 4 inside the block itself
      • 1 actual own tag #
      • 3 inline references [[]]
    • 4 inside its hierarchy
      • 2 as tags of some ancestor block
      • 2 in its page’s properties
    • 12 in the properties of the above associations
      • These are essentially second-level indirect associations.
• The effort is to:
  • keep each note as clean and focused as possible
    • Should be pleasantly readable by humans.
  • exploit the hierarchy to minimize repetitions
    • Easier to maintain and less noisy.
  • filter the notes as needed through queries
    • Queries are capable of combining the associations from all those different places.
    • Properly distributed associations allow for more meaningful queries.

[onkeltem]

Sorry, I read it several times but still the whole thing is not clear for me.
The query language is very strange for me, I cannot grasp the basics (and not really sure where I can read about it)

If we query for references to note.

What does this mean: querying references to note?

And in the child block :block/refs will not have this, but in :block/path-refs it does.

Which child block? Do you mean the one you provided:

• a book [[note]]
  • details

or some different block?

Is there a visually represented model somewhere to look at?

[Siferiax]

@onkeltem

What does this mean: querying references to note?

We want to have block that have a link either through [[ ]] or # to the page note.
Sorry that my sentence was unclear!

@onkeltem

Which child block? Do you mean the one you provided:

Yes!

@onkeltem

Is there a visually represented model somewhere to look at?

No… This is because the model is… Quite simple.

Think of all the data as living in one giant table. Each record in the table will have 3 things.

1. An entity identifier
2. An attribute
3. A value belonging to that entity attribute combination

We call these tuples and they look like:
[entity attribute value]
This is most of what advanced queries are made up of. A series of tuples to define what data we are looking for.
In the query language when we don’t know what something is we can replace that with a variable to be filled in, this is anything starting with ? followed by letters, not sure about other symbols.

Generally we have no idea what identifier a block has in the big table. So we use a variable like ?b or ?block.

:block/refs is the name of a specific attribute available to the entity of type block.
The value for this attribute will be a list of one or more other entities in the big table.
These entities can be either blocks or pages themselves, with their own set of attributes.

So when you query for blocks which are tagged with #note, you are looking for tuples of [?block :block/refs ?note] (we don’t know the entity identifier of note)
Then we have to specify what ?note we want, else we get everything.
In this case we want the page with the name note.
The tuple for that would be [?note :block/name "note"]. In this case the attribute :block/name is always the lowercase name of a page.
So we want entities who’s name is “note”. As pages need unique names in Logseq, this is only 1 result.
Therefore with those two tuples we get all blocks that have a reference/link of either [[note]] or #note.

I hope this helps?

[Siferiax]

A good learning resource to start with is http://www.learndatalogtoday.org/
This will teach the syntax of datalog interactively.

[onkeltem]

Thank you very much! Finally it’s getting more clear

Do you know maybe how to trigger Datomic code highlighting?
Please see:

What is the key for the Datomic language in CodeMirror blocks?

I learn Datomic and I wish my note snippets to be colored in ```-blocks. I assume that Datomic is not included in CodeMirror’s standard set of languages. However, is it possible that the Logseq team has integrated Datomic support into Logseq’s configuration of CodeMirror? If yes, what is the ```-key for such blocks?

[onkeltem]

Thank you once again for linking the tutorial.

I have a few question on this tutorial. Do you think this forum is a good place to ask them? I mean questions about Datalog.

[Hal9000]

@onkeltem My note taking usage pattern is similar to yours (many inputs to many different outputs), although in a different setting. I also started working namespaces, which seemed more logical at the time, until I started posting questions here and watching tutorials and I concluded that namespaces are not the optimal way to go, given the different meaning of certain tags i was using (e.g., a company name can be my employer, a technology vendor that builds a product for which I want to capture information for, etc.)

Even though I didn’t read the entire post, my suggestion is this:

• You will be able to design the optimal schema for your note taking db if and only if you fully understand how that db is going to be used for (i.e., the types of questions you want to ask) and how that can be accomplished with queries.
• Queries can do extraordinary things - from building indexes, filtering for information etc. Just look at @Siferiax’s posts and the incredible things she has built over time)
• Queries are extremely powerful, but very difficult to master; only the simple ones are trivial but they are not that useful (polite way to say - almost worthless)
• Once you have figured out the queries you need ask, then identifying the right metadata (i.e., properties) is easy.
• The only challenge is that you are tackling the problem with the very specific requirements you have today that will definitely change in the future
• Looking at what others have built is always useful (Youtube, articles etc.)

I don’t have anything to share, as I am in the process of implementing the steps above. A good starting point for defining properties:

How to use properties and templates in Logseq

Best,
Andreas

[Siferiax]

@Hal9000

Just look at @Siferiax’s posts and the incredible things she has built over time

Thank you for the compliment!