Editing day template changes all past notes?

[allstar87]

I'm just now adopting Trilium, coming from RedNotebook. I'll be using Trilium mainly as my daily journal, and allowing some of my project brainstorming and project logging to flop outside of linear time, if that makes sense.

I've been playing with the daily (and even monthly and yearly) templates for the daily journal, and I notice that if I change the template, especially "promoted attributes," it'll change on all journal entries and not just newly created ones.

Will importing my old journal entries, or down the road changing my day template, break things?

Like, the default Demo tree comes with a weight tracker, if I were to use that for awhile, then decide I no longer want to and remove it, will it disappear from all previous entries?

[eliandoran]

I've been playing with the daily (and even monthly and yearly) templates for the daily journal, and I notice that if I change the template, especially "promoted attributes," it'll change on all journal entries and not just newly created ones. Will importing my old journal entries, or down the road changing my day template, break things?

Modifying a template will generally only affect attributes and promoted attributes. The content of existing notes will not change.

Like, the default Demo tree comes with a weight tracker, if I were to use that for awhile, then decide I no longer want to and remove it, will it disappear from all previous entries?

The weight tracker extension simply adds a promoted attribute. When you add a weight, that promoted attribute writes an attribute called #weight (or something like that). If you remove the promoted attribute from the template, it will simply not be displayed for all the notes, but the weight you have added on the day notes will remain.

You can open more information on templates and attributes by going to the User Guide in the application (f1) -> Advanced Usage -> Attributes.

[allstar87]

Okay so (painting in broad strokes here) the "Promoted Attribute" creates the UI, and an "Attribute" will hold the data, if the "Promoted Attribute" is edited out later the "Attribute" still remains.

[eliandoran]

@allstar87 , generally that's it.
You can also add some non-promoted attributes to the template that will appear to new or existing notes that use that template, for example iconClass to change the icon or sorted to sort the items alphabetically.

I've been using and changing templates for quite some time now and the risk is minimal. All you have to remember is that the content is the only one that stays the same in the template instances (the notes created from the template), whereas attributes are inherited and can be modified.

[diyoyo]

As far as I remember (so BE CAREFUL with the following statement):

• editing the template is quite safe: let's say you populated the values of promoted attributes and remove some of them in the template. Then it won't show up anymore in the old daily notes. yet, if you add the attribute definition back in the template, the value of the attribute should still be there (you should test this hypothesis with a test attribute first! The outcome of the experiment I ran is old now)

What is really dangerous imho, is cloning the template by mistake, as the modification on the clone will change the original template, and then make you believe that everything else has changed.

So when you want to reuse a template to create a new template, make sure you actually duplicate it:

Right-Click ⇒ Advanced ⇒ Duplicate subtree

some additional thoughts: be careful when your template has children scripts. Again, if you only want to duplicate the script to reuse the code, you may clone it by mistake and this can cause damage if the script is ran again on your old notes when editing them (for example with ~runOnNoteChange) ! So use true duplication to reuse and modify demo scripts.