Allow a title field to set a page's link display text

[cvincent]

In my system, I prefer to keep my notes named without spaces, and they also begin with a Zettelkasten-style timestamp. So they all look something like 20250223164041-Title-goes-here.md.

As a result, the links Dataview generates are all rather ugly.

My current workaround is that I define an inline title property at the start of each note, like this:

---
[frontmatter here]
---

# (title:: Note title here)

[notes here]

And then if I drop down to JS queries, I can create nice-looking links:

dv.table(["Title", "etc"], dv.pages("#projects/ready").map(
  (p) => [dv.fileLink(p.file.path, false, p.title), "etc"]
))

But this means I can't use DQL at all if I want nicer nice-looking links.

It would be nice if I could configure Dataview with a field name to look for link display names, and fall back to the original behavior if it's not present.

While I'm here...

This also got me wondering if there's a way to save common helper functions available to Dataviews? That would certainly make my workaround a little easier.

And much more tangentially, I had wondered how hard it would be for Dataview to make section headings available on page objects and/or in queries. The inline attribute isn't too bad, but the first thing I looked for before changing my templates to that was to see if Dataview could just grab the first section header as-is.

Anyways, just wanted to throw that out there, and also open to any suggestions on how I might improve my current approach. Dataview has been a real game-changer for my note-taking overall!

[cvincent]

I just realized that DQL has a link function, d'oh! So I don't need to drop into JS queries just to get better links. Still, I suppose it would be a nice convenience to have a default property for link display text.

[cvincent]

Aaaand I just ran into https://github.com/saml-dev/obsidian-custom-js, which should address another part of my question.

[holroy]

In its most basic variant you could use link(file.link, file.title) in your queries, a little more fail-safe variant which would require a little more typing could be something like link(file.link, default(file.title, file.name)) which would fallback on the file name, if no title has been defined.

Not sure if this as such then qualifies for a dedicated function, since there exist a good workaround. However, whenever when/if I get around to implementing user functions it would be a nice candidate for such a function.