Search notes with a null or empty attribute value

[pangzhen]

Description

Note defines an attribute with the label #label:finish=promoted,single,date. When using the API searchForNotes(query: string, searchParams: SearchParams): BNote[] to search for finish=null or finish='', how should the query parameter be written?

If I write #finish=null or #finish='', it fails to return notes.

TriliumNext Version

0.101.3

What operating system are you using?

macOS

What is your setup?

Local + server sync

Operating System Version

macOS Sonoma 14.7.4

Error logs

No response

[dosubot]

Hi @pangzhen! I'm Dosu and I’m helping the Trilium team.

Trilium's search syntax doesn't support directly querying for notes where an attribute like finish is null or empty. Queries like #finish='' or #finish=null don't work because the search parser treats those as literal string comparisons, and the comparator for = returns false if the attribute value is missing or empty.

If you want to find notes missing the finish attribute, use not #finish. If you want notes where finish is missing, empty, or not equal to a specific value (for example, "foo"), use #finish!='foo'—this matches notes where finish is missing, empty, or any value except "foo" source.

The attribute definition (#label:finish=promoted,single,date) doesn't affect this behavior. There isn't a way to distinguish between null and empty string values in the search syntax—both are treated as "not present" for the purposes of these queries.

To reply, just mention @dosu.

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