Feature Request: Tag Based Structure

[Game-Smith]

Hello,

First off, I want to thank you for making such an awesome plugin. I have been working on my own West Marches script, and now I don't have to worry about rolling my own hex map system. :)

My request is could you look into the possibility of using tags as a valid option instead of the hardcoded folder pathways? I know we can setup our own custom folders, but in a more complex vault that was not created with your tool from the beginning, this can result in a fairly large issue trying to mitigate and merge the two styles together.

To give you a real world example, in one of my larger RPG vaults I have multiple "Settlements" folders broken down by geographic region/territory instead of one master "Towns" folder. I also differentiate between the sizes of the settlements for other purposes in my vault, so things like hamlet, village, town, city, etc.

An example of the structure could look like the following:

Region A
|_ Settlements
    |_ Hamlet 1
    |_ Hamlet 2
    |_ Town 1
    |_ Town 2
    |_ Village 1
    |_ Village 2
    |_ City 1
Region B
|_ Settlements
    |_ Hamlet 1
    |_ Town 1
    |_ Town 2
    |_ Town 3
    |_ Town 4
    |_ Village 1
    |_ Village 2
    |_ City 1
    |_ City 2
Etc..

If I could just provide a list of tags in the editor for your tool like "#Hamlet, #Village, #Town, #City" or even just add a more generic "#Settlement" tag to each of my existing notes, then I could keep my existing structure (that other tools rely on) and still be able to provide the means to populate the list for your tool as well.

I imagine this approach would work with the other elements in your tool like Factions, Dungeons, Features, Quests, etc. All of them could be provided by a tag (or group of tags). Even your hexes when they get created could use a "#Hex" tag to make it easier to sort notes by when searching. I could see keeping the "World" folder as a requirement (and probably the "Hexes" folder since that is something your tool directly creates its files into), that way you don't have to build a whitelisting system, but still allow for some optimization when searching a vault.

Again, this is meant as helpful feedback, and I hope you keep adding awesome new stuff to this tool! When I get further along on my West Marches script, I may try and make an adapter for this plugin so I can manage the hex maps permissions through the same tooling.

[sbuffkin]

This is a really good idea, really just a blind spot for me prior due to not having a full picture of how this would mesh with other plugins. Let me think a bit on the implementation of it especially with regard to setup/settings, but while it represents a pretty big change, I think it'd be workable.
You'd basically set tags for each thing rather than folder paths. A different mode, probably one that has to be set on setup. I believe that the obsidian api should be able to manage searching vault by tag just as well as searching by folder. Do you think the table notes should be treated in similar fashion or do those + the hexes make the most sense in your setup as "world folder" territory?

[Game-Smith]

No worries about not thinking of tags before, I only thought of it because I had literally been working on the same problem with my West Marches user script just a few days before. I user a "#Player" tag on any note that should track someone who is playing or has played in my game, and then I use a "#Player-Character" tag on any note that denotes someone's character in the game. With a little bit of custom frontmatter to assign the "Player" property on the Player Character notes, I can build a list of all the Players in my game and all of their Characters, without having to hard code everything in one master note or roster. Instead I can build it at runtime with the click of a button running a Templater command.

Here is the code I use to look for tags:

if (cache.frontmatter && cache.frontmatter.tags) 
{
    if (Array.isArray(cache.frontmatter.tags)) 
    {
        foundTags.push(...cache.frontmatter.tags);
    }
    else if (typeof cache.frontmatter.tags === 'string') 
    {
        foundTags.push(cache.frontmatter.tags);
    }
}

I just loop through the cache object and look for the appropriate frontmatter and then add it to a foundTags collection that I can do more interesting stuff with later. I don't know if there are major differences between the API as a plugin vs a user script though.

As far as the tables, I honestly haven't had a chance to poke at them in much detail yet, so I can't give you a great answer right now, but I would imagine that it would work similar to the hexes as something you are creating as a part of your plugin. I will try and poke at it some more this weekend. I have some existing quick roll/random tables in another vault. I'll drag them into my test vault and see how they behave compared to making them natively in your plugin. My first guess would be that the structure is more unique in this case with how you set up all the wiring behind the scenes, so this one may not be as decoupled as the others.

Just making an educated guess, but at this point I think your structure would look something like this:

World Folder
|_ Hexes Folder
|_ Tables Folder
|_ "#Tagged" Notes
|_ "#Tagged" Notes
|_ "#Tagged" Notes
|_ "#Tagged" Notes
|_ "#Tagged" Notes

That way you still get the whitelisted effect of only searching the World Folder and ignoring any other folders outside of it (i.e. Assets, Templates, Scripts, Rules, Bestiary, etc...), so this should help speed up the scanning of the vault. And then having the Hexes and Table folders (these could still be customized to a different location like you have now), this gives you a clear place to insert the custom notes that your plugin creates, but still allows the flexibility to pull other topics from existing notes via tags like "#Dungeon" or "#Settlement" (that could still be customized in the settings as well).