Customizing a Trilium Report

Been exploring Trilium for notes. One thing I’ll say is the nerdy features are directly accessible to my existing skills.

See, each note system has some way — or a plugin providing some way — to query information about your collected notes. Logseq uses Datascript, which is uh Lisp-ish? Obsidian — if you add the Dataview plugin — has DQL, which is SQL-ish.

Trilium keeps everything in a SQLite database that you can query directly.

My immediate reaction on realizing what I was seeing? Look I don’t usually communicate on this site via memes and image captions, but:

I know the gist of SQL. Let’s play with this.

Made a custom template for notes about people. Assigned that template to the appropriate notes. Got curious about how my template-using notes were spread out.

Copied the query from Trilium Demo / Statistics / Note type count and tweaked it a little for my needs.

SELECT
    templateNote.title,
    SUM(
        CASE WHEN note.isDeleted=0 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END
    ) AS countNotDeleted,
    SUM(
        CASE WHEN note.isDeleted=1 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END
    ) AS countDeleted
FROM attributes attr
INNER JOIN notes note
    ON note.noteId = attr.noteId
INNER JOIN notes templateNote
    ON attr.value = templateNote.noteId
WHERE
    attr.name = 'template'
GROUP BY attr.value
ORDER BY countNotDeleted desc

I duplicated Note type count, pasted my new query, then adjusted the layout JS to reflect the tweaked query.

The result:

The demo graph uses Chart.js, which is fine. I’m already thinking about using Vega instead.

One thing at a time.

Trilium. It’s got SQL. I like that.