Create, use then delete duplicate draft

1

I have Taskpaper list which I sometimes want to convert to a markdown to-do list and send to Obsidian.

I have an action which creates a duplicate of the draft, strips the tags, converts the Taskpaper “-” to markdown “- ” and sends the duplicate to Obsidian. So far so good.

Once this is done I want to delete the duplicate draft and if I use “after success” to move it to trash it is the original that goes to trash and not the duplicate. Please advise how I can trash the duplicate and keep the original.

Thanks

Ian

2

Either modify the action to address the created draft rather than the current draft by setting the istrashed true or modify the action to not create a new draft at all and just manipulate and share a copy of the original content (without placing it in a new draft).

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3

Thank you @sylumer - I’ll try the ‘istrashed’.

4

@sylumer Thank you - working now and it is just what I wanted.

Ian

5

You may have a reason for creating the draft, but you might just want to just adjust the content and send it off without generating a duplicate. That might be as easy as not calling update() on the draft you create in your example.

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6

Thank you @agiletortoise that seems like such an elegant solution and it may be but I can’t get it to work. I had another look at what I believed to have worked before and realised it wasn’t working. The conversion happens but the action sends the original draft to Obsidian - I am unable to distinguish between my original and the copy after the conversion.
Now, I can do it but in two steps. First, convert the Taskpaper draft to a markdown checklist without any tags. Then send that to Obsidian and delete on success.

7

Could you share your action? Happy to help, but need to see what’s going on.

8

I use this script as the stage before your “Send to Obsidian Vault” action

var d2 = Draft.create();
d2.content = draft.content;
d2.languageGrammar = draft.languageGrammar;
d2.update();

for (let tag of draft.tags) {
    draft.removeTag(tag);
 }
 d2.update();

const findRegex = /^(\s*)\- /gm;

// define replacement expression…
const replaceWith = "$1- [ ] ";

// do the replacement…
draft.content = draft.content.replace(findRegex, replaceWith);
d2.update();

Now I have two versions of the Draft, one Taskpaper which I want to keep and the other a tag-free markdown version which I want to send to Obsidian and then delete.

The “Send to Obsidian Vault” action ignores (probably correctly) my reformatted duplicate and sends the original to Obsidian.

Finally, I would like to delete the duplicate after sending it to Obsidian.

I appreciate your help, thank you.

Ian

9

I would suggest simplifying that by never creating another draft you don’t need.

This just creates a variable s containing the Markdown version you want to send…

const findRegex = /^(\s*)\- /gm
const replaceWith = "$1- [ ] "

// put markdown version in a variable
let s = draft.content.replace(findRegex, replaceWith)

It sounds like you are trying to combine this with the “Send to Obsidian Vault” action, which uses a URL to open Obsidian.

You could continue this script to create a template tag with the newly generated content, like:

draft.setTemplateTag("markdown", s)

Then, in the Open URL step (which has to happen after the script step), just change the [[content]] tag in the URL to [[markdown]] to use this generated text instead:

obsidian://new?vault=[[vaultName]]&name=[[fileName]]&content=[[markdown]]

To summarize, you generate the new text, put it in a custom template tag, and use that tag in the URL template to output the markdown instead of the content of the draft.

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10

@agiletortoise Thank you so much. Works perfectly. I also removed the [[hashtags]] from the content Template Tag because Obsidian can’t handle scoped tags.
Ian

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