(Feature request) template-Typed Attributes/Relationships

[diyoyo]

Describe feature

When defining a relation to another note, like for a Person template: #relation:FamilyRelatives="promoted,multi", it would be nice to be able to force the type of template of the accepted notes.

That way, when filling the 'form' for a Person, it will filter the auto-completion based on that forced template and avoid proposing notes that are not using the Person template too.

Additional Information

Example:

#relation:FamilyRelatives="promoted,multi,template=@Person"
#relation:livesIn="promoted,single,template=@City"

where @City could be automatically replaced by the noteId of the City template, or something to avoid collision between different City things.

[rom1dep]

I've been thinking about the same thing. Essentially, this idea is about setting a limit as to which are the permissible notes that a relationship can handle. I see two independent, generic and complementary ways how this can be achieved:

• constraining by attribute (and optionally, by attribute+value): here, any note possessing a certain attribute (or a certain value for a certain attribute) qualifies.
  This is a generalization of your proposal: where you consider template to be the only attribute available for filtering, I would like to be able to use any arbitrary attribute for cases like e.g. "bring me any note that carries #work as attribute", or "bring me any note that carries the attribute #workCompany with the value Mycorp)
• constraining by inheritance: here, the position of the notes in the tree in relation to one(s) provided sets the condition. It is about defining rules such as "bring me any note that is the child of ~NoteXYZ" or "bring me any note that is the parent of ~NoteABC". This approach seems more adequate when dealing with hierarchies of typed notes (e.g. (Persons>(Family/Friends/(Colleagues>Current/Past))

but then many questions arise when it comes to guaranteeing that relationships bounds are consistent (when moving/updating/deleting notes).