41 // Dates in Formable

Explaining some aspects of Formable to someone this week, I realised that I’ve never written a lot about how dates work in the app.

I’ll use this issue to do so.

Working with Dates in Formable

The help pages mention dates under mentioning:

Typing an exclamation mark will allow you to insert dates inline.

Later you can use filters to only get blocks related to a specific date.

Depending on use cases I could see myself adding more date ranges (now it’s always only the range of a day).

Currently the most used date filter is for getting blocks related to today, so for a daily notes page. It’s also why I initially built this feature.

The Data Structure Behind It

Dates aren’t just an attribute. There are no attributes in Formable. Just blocks and relations. A date can be related to blocks just like any other block.

In the screenshot above I check for a “regards” relation to today. The default relation for new blocks in a list is a child relation, but I prefer not to use that for daily notes, as I might for example write about things that happened yesterday, or are planned in the future. I just want to mark that what I’m writing is in some way related to today’s thoughts. Using a “created at” relation also wouldn’t fit, as I often bring in blocks created on another day into my daily notes.

Some people might want to set up their daily notes with different filters, and that’s welcome. It’s why filters are so present in the UI in the first place.

Thanks for reading!
–Emil