How to batch promote attributes after importing enex?

[mengxin523]

Describe feature

Hi，
I have imported 2,000 notebooks and found that all their attributes are empty. How can I update these attributes in batches? The creation and modification times of each notebook are available on the notebook page itself.

Regards，
Leon

Additional Information

No response

[dosubot[bot]]

Hi @mengxin523! I'm Dosu and I’m helping the Trilium team.

The ENEX importer in Trilium actually does preserve creation and modification dates from Evernote — it extracts them from the <created> and <updated> tags and writes them directly to the database via SQL [1]. So your imported notes should already have dateCreated and dateModified set correctly as system properties, even if they don't appear as visible promoted attributes on the note.

If you want to make these dates visible as promoted attributes (or copy other metadata from the note content into attributes), you can write a backend script to do it in batch. Here's a pattern:

// Run this as a backend script (Code note with #run=backendStartup or execute via Script Launcher)
const parentNote = api.getNote("YOUR_PARENT_NOTE_ID"); // root of imported notes
const children = parentNote.getSubtree().notes;

for (const note of children) {
    // Copy system dates to custom label attributes
    note.setLabel("customDateCreated", note.dateCreated);
    note.setLabel("customDateModified", note.dateModified);
    
    // Or parse dates from the note content if needed
    // const content = note.getContent();
    // ... extract dates with regex ...
    // note.setLabel("createdDate", extractedDate);
}

api.log(`Updated ${children.length} notes`);

Key API methods for batch attribute operations [2]:

• note.setLabel(name, value) — sets or updates a label
• note.getChildNotes() / note.getSubtree() — iterate over notes
• api.searchForNotes(query) — find notes by search query

One caveat: dateModified cannot be written via the scripting API (it's auto-managed by the system). If you need to override it, you'd need direct SQL [3]:

api.sql.execute(
    'UPDATE notes SET dateCreated = ? WHERE noteId = ?',
    [newDateValue, note.noteId]
);

⚠️ Always back up your database before running batch operations on 2,000 notes. Test on a small subset first.

To reply, just mention @dosu.

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[mengxin523]

Thank you very much for your reply. I am new to Trilium, could you please tell me where to run these scripts? @dosubot

[dosubot[bot]]

Welcome to Trilium! Here's how to create and run a script:

1. Create a new note — right-click in the note tree and create a new note. Change its type to "Code" and set the language/MIME type to JS Backend (since you'll be working with note attributes, you need a backend script) [1].

2. Write your script in the note's editor. You'll have access to the Script API which lets you search for notes, read/write attributes, etc. [2].

3. Run the script by clicking the execute button (▶️) that appears at the top of the code note [3].

For example, a simple backend script to batch-update attributes might look like:

const notes = api.searchForNotes('#yourSearchQuery');
for (const note of notes) {
    // read content, parse dates, set attributes, etc.
    note.setLabel('someLabel', 'someValue');
}

For more details, check out the Trilium Scripts User Guide [4] and the Frontend Basics guide [5] — these walk through scripting step by step.

Would you like help writing the specific script to extract creation/modification dates from your imported notebook content and set them as note attributes?

To reply, just mention @dosu.

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[eliandoran]

This might help: https://docs.triliumnotes.org/user-guide/scripts