I’m planning to use Tiddlywiki for my English subject notes. I was thinking of using it as my personal dictionary, like a tiddler per word and would contain other information related to the word. I wanna sort them based on the topic category they belong to (eg. health, food, business etc). I know how to use tags but I don’t want too many tags crowding the side bar tag section. So I was wondering if i can make a field called ‘category’ and then add a value to it. Something like Category: health.
Then create a specific tiddler to filter the words according to their value. That way, I will have a list of all the words with field value ‘health’ in one place for easy access. I am not sure if fields work this way. Can you provide me a solution. Thank you!
Yes, it can be done with fields just like with tags.
For example, I’ve got a project going write now of converting some audio files to video, generating transcripts, putting those online, etc. One of the custom fields for each title is “video”, with a value of “needed” or “done”. It’s just a sort of yes/no checkbox at this point, but you could have additional values like “assigned”, “started”, “cancelled”, etc.
Then there is a separate tiddle for each of those conditions (e.g., video: needed, video: assigned, video: cancelled, etc.). In that tiddler i have a single like of code -
<<list-links [field:video[needed]sort[caption]]>>
<<list-links [field:video[assigned]sort[caption]]>>
<<list-links [field:video[cancelled]sort[caption]]>>
and so on. Each of those tiddlers lists the tiddlers of the titles that i’m converting, and each entry on the list is a link to the appropriate tiddler. Helps me track what needs doing next, but your use will obviously be different.
There are plenty of other ways to dress up the lists, and have the data do other tasks (county how many of each type, etc.), but that would be kind of specific, and you get the idea.
The example code may look a little fiddly, but it’s pretty simple:
- list-links command
- a filter using a field named “video”
- the criteria to look for in that field
- how to sort and display those links (in this case by the information in the “caption” field, which i use if i want to have the link titled differently from the formal name of the audio file)
I know this is kind of a long way to say “yes”, but it’s a very common function, and there are several ways to do it. And TW is perfect for the kind of project you described.
Oh, and welcome to the group!
Welcome to the community @gypsygoose
Yes fields can work that way. Keep in mind tags are just a special implementation of a “list field”. In fact the tag picker allows you to choose another field. This was discussed recently in another thread and there are plugins available to support this as well.
<<tag-picker tagField:"source">>
<$list filter="[{!!source}enlist-input[]]">
<<tag>>
</$list>
You will find it just a little more complex then making use of these list fields than using the tags operators but once you understand you will have a lot of design opportunities.
Search for “alternative tags” and you will find many of the discussions on this.
- I will keep looking but somewhere we have a list of all tag operators and their equivalent for other fieldnames.
Thank you for taking your time to answer my question. I just tried it and it was exactly what I needed. However, there are some values that are more than 2 words, how do I write them in the code? Also, if it’s not too much to ask, how do I create a list that displays vocabulary that belong to two specific fields. Example, a field called category with a value health, and then that same word has another field called ‘level’ with a value beginner, intermediate or advanced etc. I’d like to list them in such a way that will sort them based on difficulty. Thanks for the welcome too. You are helpful.
Thank you! I am so new to Tiddly and I am having difficulties understanding codes, plugins and other stuff but I will look into it. 