if it has a schema icon, it means that it matches a schema

notes are always notes and schemas are always schemas. a note can match a schema

a schema consists of nodes. a particular type of schema node is a

namespace node

a schema that is a

namespace

has the property that it will match everything one level under it

coming back to the terminology soon; before that a clarifying question 🙂 - what's the use case for namespace schema? at the moment I think I can only see that via an icon (?), but what if I add a note below a non-namespace schema - how does that differ and why the separation between namespace and non-namespace is meaningful?

naming things is hard 🙂 if things are confusing, more than likely because i made it that way 😅

as for namespaces, they were originally put in place because lots of hierarchies followed the

{namespace}/{instance-of-namespace}

pattern. (eg. projects - you could enumerate every single project as a child in the schema or you could make

project

a

namespace

and call it a day)

before we introduced the

pattern

attribute to schemas, a

namespace

was the only way to do a

*

glob match using schemas

yml
id: project 
namespace: true

is almost equivalent to

yml
id: project
pattern: project.*

the difference is that

childOfDomainNamespace

will apply if namespace is set

this being said, if you have an idea to simplify this, i'm all ears 🙂

hmm, just thinking if it would just be

id: project

without pattern or namespace, what would be the drawback

the default case is to just use

id

yml
id: project

is equivalent to

yml
id: project
namespace: false
pattern: project

yep. what if that would be the only thing the user can do - what would be the drawback

so if a user couldn't use a namespace or pattern, then they would need to explicitly enumerate each child

yml
id: project
children:
- p1
- p2
- p3
-...

nah, I mean if they just add the notes under the project

it would also make it hard to match notes like

journals

without any schema

what would be the drawback of that in comparison to namespaced project

can you give an example of adding notes under the project without schemas?

also, current schema for journal. wouldn't be feasible without the

pattern

attribute

yml
# schema for journals
# the following schema will match the follwoing
# 
# journal
# journal.2020
# journal.2020.09
# journal.2020.09.12
# journal.2020.09.12.foo.md

version: 1
schemas:
- id: journal
  title: journal
  desc: ""
  parent: root
  children:
    - year
- id: year
  title: year
  pattern: "[0-2][0-9][0-9][0-9]"
  children: 
    - month
- id: month
  title: month
  pattern: "[0-9][0-9]"
  children: 
    - day
- id: day
  title: day
  pattern: "[0-9][0-9]"
  namespace: true

> can you give an example of adding notes under the project without schemas? Just slamming "project.my-project" into the note structure without any concern about schemas 🙂

I think currently how this would be visible to me is that I miss an icon. Maybe there's also something else?

yep, that's exactly it

schemas don't stop you from adding notes and aren't required

thats why i like to compare them to an optional type system

eg. typescript definitions

you can use them when you have lots of notes under a hierarchy and want to enforce some sort of consistency

in my knowledge base, i would guess maybe ~60% of my notes are covered by a schema