Frontmatter redundancy

[aalexei]

I'm transitioning from org-roam to denote but before I convert a whole bunch of notes, will I end up with problems if my frontmatter only includes the #+title: and some other custom fields?

The default at the moment also adds a #+date, #+identifier, and #+filetags but that seems redundant since all that info in is the filename. It also introduces friction for me, since if they become different I then have to decide which was correct, so I'd rather remove them and have a single source of that info. I'm worried that if I omit them some functionality will break somewhere.

[ZharMeny]

Frontmatter is the metadata, and probably should be the 'source of truth', while the filename is for sorting/filename searching. You can also synchronise the filename with the frontmatter using denote-rename-file-using-front-matter. I would imagine most functionality should not break unless you remove the note's identifier. Note that the ID of the note uses the note creation time (in ISO 8601-like format).

P.S. As you are transitioning from org-roam I should probably also mention the denote-date command, which will prompt for the DATE and TIME you want to create a note with, along the usual TITLE and KEYWORDS.

[aalexei]

The problem with the front matter as the source of truth is that not all notes have it by design. One of the great advantages of denotes filename scheme is that binary notes are first class citizens, I can add non-text notes and tag, search and link to them. The file name is the more 'primitive' object also, and accessible without even having to open and parse the files, so at a pinch I can throw together a simple bash script to process my notes without worrying about content format. As far as I can see from the code, denote-id-regexp is only used to parse the id out of the filename, not the frontmatter. In fact denote-rename-file-using-front-matter never touches the id and the function has the comment (I think this answers my OP!):

Never modify the identifier of the FILE, if any, even if it is
edited in the front matter.  Denote considers the file name to be
the source of truth in this case to avoid potential breakage with
typos and the like.

In contrast, the title in the filename is a sluggified version of the 'true' title in the frontmatter when it's a text note. Buffer listing go off the true title and denote-link will insert the true title. The #+date seems to carry the same info as the id, not sure if there are some org functions that use it? There are independent org function to set file-tags and you could use them together with denote-rename-file-using-front-matter to propagate them to the file name, but it doesn't seem much of a loss to just use denotes keyword functions.

[aalexei]

Incidentally, just tried denote-rename-file-using-front-matter/denote-keywords-add etc with

#+title:      Test node. With functions
:drawer:
#+date:       [2024-05-05 Sun 17:13]
#+property: DIR 20240505T171333
#+author: Blah Blah Blah
#+subtitle: Blah Blah
#+startup: latexpreview
#+setupfile: ~/setupfile.org
#+filetags:   :denote:test:
#+identifier: 20240505T171333
:end:

and it happily picked out the filetags to update despite all the header noise and the drawer. This means you can put everything in an org drawer and collapse it and get a visually clean note, and not lose any functionality. Cool.