Handling Published or Posted date in addition to Created and Modified

[maphew]

I have a large body of content I've imported into Trilium. I'm wondering how to handle dates in a way that's more useful.

Each note or node in Trilium has a Created and Modified date. For imported notes Created is set to the date of import. That's good to know and perhaps save, but I'm typically more interested in when that note was originally written or published in that external source. I want to introduce a third date: publication, or perhaps currency date, e.g. "information in this page is current to Nov 2023".

The practical approach is to use the api to modify the Creation date to be a date extracted from the content after the node is initially created. I've sketched a process and some python code that will work for me:

For each note under root-note:

1. Scan first x lines for a text date,
2. Convert to date, it might be any format of mm/dd/yy, dd-mm-yy, etc.
3. Change 'Created' date to this found date
4. Add end-matter note:

• horizontal rule
• Import date: {original creation date}
• Replace "Created with OneNote." with "Source: OneNote"

Before I embark on this wholesale though, is this a good approach?

[eliandoran]

Generally seems fine but personally I would not touch the content of the note (end-matter as you call it).

You can just alter the creation date and keep the modified date to the date of the import. Or if the information is that important you can simply store it as a label and display it using promoted attributes.

You can have a similar tag for the source while you remove "Created with OneNote" entirely.

This would also prevent you from issues if you run the script twice, as you wouldn't want the content to be appended twice with the information.

[maphew]

thanks for the suggestions! I wondered how to deal with multiple runs. I don't think I'd use Modified date for Imported Date though because it will change when the note is edited; so label attribute it is.