Making Your First Schema

Summary

As you write more notes, you might find yourself re-using the same template across multiple notes. You can use schemas to automatically apply a template to notes at a given hierarchy.

In this tutorial, we will walkthrough creating a schema for your daily journal that can automatically apply The Five Minute Journal to all your entries.

Concepts

• Schemas are cross vault. If you have multiple schemas with same starting pattern, the last schema loaded takes precedence.
• Every level in the schema needs to have children

Daily journal notes

Templates

Schemas

Steps

Create 5MJ template

• Open lookup (Ctrl+L / Cmd+L)

• Type templates.daily-5mj in the text prompt and hit enter to create the template

• Copy and paste the following markdown:

<!--
Based on the journaling method created by Intelligent Change:
- [Intelligent Change: Our Story](https://www.intelligentchange.com/pages/our-story)
- [The Five Minute Journal](https://www.intelligentchange.com/products/the-five-minute-journal)
-->

## Morning

<!-- Fill out this section after waking up -->

### Gratitude

I am grateful for:

1.
2.
3.

### What would make today great?

1.
2.
3.

### Daily affirmations

I am...

## Evening

<!-- Fill out this section before going to sleep, reflecting on your day -->

### Amazing things that happened today

1.
2.
3.

### How could I have made today even better?

I could have made today better by

• Save the file.

You now have a new template with the 5MJ outline.

Create 5MJ schema

Templates can be used with or without schemas. Run Apply Template to insert a template into the currently opened note.

• Open schema lookup (Ctrl+Shift+L / Cmd+Shift+L)
• Type 5mj in the text prompt and hit enter to create the schema, which should look like the following:

version: 1
imports: []
schemas:
  - id: 5mj
    children: []
    title: 5mj
    parent: root

Update 5MJ schema contents

We are going to use Inline Schema, which is a simpler form of schema taking less configuration lines while using indentation for visual understanding.

• Replace the content of 5mj.schema.yml with the following:

version: 1
schemas:
# Daily is the top most schema since its parent is 'root' it must have an identifier
# this identifier 'daily' will be used when using 'Lookup (schema)' command.
- id: daily
  parent: root
  title: daily
  desc: ""
  # Children of the top most schema do not need to contain identifier and just 
  # require a 'pattern' to be set to match the hierarchy of notes.
  children:
    - pattern: journal
      children:
          # This pattern matches the YYYY (year) child hierarchy
        - pattern: "[0-2][0-9][0-9][0-9]"
          children:
              # This pattern matches the MM (month) child hierarchy
            - pattern: "[0-1][0-9]"
              children:
                  # This pattern matches the DD (day) child hierarchy
                - pattern: "[0-3][0-9]"
                  # As with regular schema we can set the template to be used with
                  # the match of our notes. Below is an example usage of shorthand template
                  # definition (which defaults to type: note). 
                  desc: Five Minute Journal
                  template: templates.daily-5mj

The pattern attribute is using a Glob Pattern, which is an expression used to match ranges and combinations of characters.

To match with the daily journal structure:

• Example: daily.journal.2021.12.31
• Patterns:
  • Year: [0-2][0-9][0-9][0-9] means match the range 0000 - 2999
  • Month: [0-1][0-9] means match the range 00 - 19
  • Day: [0-3][0-9] means match the range 00 - 39

This means all new daily journal notes are the pattern ranges.

Create a new daily journal

Creating a daily journal entry should result in the templates.daily-5mj template automatically inserted.

• Run Create Daily Journal Note (Ctrl+Shift+I / Cmd+Shift+I)

You should see a new daily journal note with the 5MJ template inserted.

Congratulations!

Key takeaways

After doing this, you've now:

• Created a 5MJ template
• Created a 5MJ schema
• Created your first daily journal with the 5MJ template applied via schema

Next steps

• Learn to swiftly create schema targeting existing note hierarchies
• Learn to level-up your daily life with the bullet journaling workflow
• Learn to explore your schema visually using the schema graph
• Check out an end-to-end workstyle, managing 20k notes, using schemas and daily journals from A Day in Dendron

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Backlinks

• 0.76
• 0.79
• Getting Things Done (GTD), Bullet Journaling, and Other Task Management Workflow Demos with Dendron
• 20 - Your future self will thank you: Building your personal documentation