Creating typed links in Obsidian using properties

One thing that I’ve found myself wanting in Obsidian is links with a type so you can say how one note is related to another. A common use case is having one or more parent notes for one note. Another example is for language learning: I am learning Danish in Obsidian and I create nodes for new words I learn and then I create typed links for words related to a word, for a “topic” that the words belongs to, for opposite words etc.

There’s a long forum post on the Obsidian forums talking about how typed links might be represented in Obsidian. None of the ideas there have been implemented really - but the approach presented here using Obsidian properties work well.

How to represent typed links in Obsidian

One way to represent a typed link between one Obsidian note and another is to use a property. You can either represent this within your note using the :: syntax, like so:

parent:: [[Parent Note]]

A nice thing about this syntax is that you can add it anywhere in your note. A downside is that you can’t cleanly embed this syntax within a paragraph of text link you can with normal links. One approach is to place your types links like this after a paragraph like so:

A cat is a type of [[Mammal]] which hunts [[Mice]].
hunts:: [[Mice]]
typeof:: [[Mammal]]

You can also add a property to the frontmatter of your note using the [[syntax inside a property.

You can have more than one parent or more than one link

I’ve found that having more than parent for a node can be quite useful particularly as nodes become more general. For example, a topic might be relevant for a particular project, documentation and an overarching goal. For other forms of relations, it’s very natural to have multiple links.

With the breadcrumb :: syntax you can repeat the same “link type” multiple times in your note

parent:: [[Plan for next week]]

More writing...

parent:: [[Evergreen note 1 ]]

If you are using properties you can set the property type to a list and then add multiple links with [[.

Using typed links

But what’s the use of these properties. The first think you can do is click on them with a mouse! You can also add them Obsidian’s graph view using the useful Graph Link Types plugin by Frisch.

I also often create dataview property queries to create Automated Maps of Content as part of my maps of content, with the following query:

```dataview
LIST WHERE contains(parent, [[Current Node]])
```

Here contains work both if a node has a single parent or multiple parents.

You can create a Templater template for this like so:

```dataview
LIST WHERE contains(parent, [[<% tp.file.title %>]])
```

Finishing up

I hope that was useful or interesting. If it was you might like to:

1. Read my page about how to automated maps of content in Obsidian.

2. Read my slightly academic review of note taking in Obsidian.

You can also subscribe to this blog where I write about reading and Obsidian, or follow me on X where I write about various thinks - but sometimes Obsidian.