Property Logs

An Obsidian plugin that automatically logs property changes in frontmatter with timestamps. Track status updates, deadline changes, priority shifts, and any other property mutations to build a rich audit trail for your notes.

• Automatic property tracking — Watch any frontmatter property for changes and automatically log them to a history array with timestamps
• Flexible filtering — Include/exclude specific folders and tags to control which notes are tracked
• Smart deduplication — Optionally skip logging duplicate status values or overwrite same-day entries
• Comments — Add timestamped comments to notes to annotate status history
• Daily note logging — Mirror property changes into your daily note using tag-based templates, so you can see at a glance what moved each day
• Visual status charts — Insert interactive charts that visualize how status evolved over time across multiple notes (requires Dataview and Obsidian Charts)
• Timeline dashboards — Create saved, interactive date-axis dashboards with independent scope, grouping, sorting, colors, and click-to-update bars
• Embedded dashboards — Drop a dashboard into any note with a property-logs code block; inside a periodic note it centers on that note's date and zooms to match the note type
• Periodic-note integration — Clickable day, week, month, quarter, and year cells open the matching note through Journals, with week numbers and dividers on the axis
• Notes from your journal — Marked task lines such as - [n] Felt good about this appear on the timeline for that note's date, with a per-marker icon and color
• Foldable rows — Collapse a status or group row into a single line carrying one count per day
• Global value styles — Set a level and color once per property value; any dashboard can override them
• Customizable keys — Rename the history key and property names to match your vault's naming conventions
• Multiple tracked properties — Go beyond status—track deadline changes, priority updates, assignees, or any other property

• Track project status evolution — See how a project moved from Planned → Active → Completed with exact dates
• Monitor milestone deadlines — Log when deadlines shift, detect scope creep
• Visualize team capacity — Chart how many projects were Active, In Progress, or Blocked each month

• Publishing workflow — Track Draft → Review → Scheduled → Published with timestamps
• Content priority tracking — Monitor how content priorities changed before publication
• Audience reach visualization — Chart how many articles were Featured vs. Archived each period

• Note maturity tracking — Watch notes progress from Seedling → Growing → Evergreen
• Research status — Monitor whether research topics are Exploring, Consolidating, or Complete
• Learning progress — Chart concept mastery levels over time

• Goal progress — Log goal status changes (Planning → Active → Achieved → Archived)
• Quarterly performance — Visualize OKR completion rates per quarter
• Initiative tracking — Monitor initiatives across pipeline stages

• Change history — Maintain a full audit trail of any property that matters to you
• Decision documentation — Log when decisions change status with optional comments
• Compliance — Create timestamped records of status/property changes for audit purposes

The plugin monitors your vault's metadata cache. When a property in a watched note changes, it automatically appends an entry to a configurable history array in the note's frontmatter. Only changes are logged—the first time a property is seen, it becomes the baseline.

A note with status changes might look like this:

---
title: Launch new website
status: Active
color: blue
status_history:
  - dateSet: "2025-01-15"
    statusSet: Backlog
  - dateSet: "2025-02-20"
    statusSet: Active
---

If you track additional properties (e.g., deadline), changed values appear in the same history entry:

---
title: Launch new website
status: Active
deadline: "2025-04-30"
status_history:
  - dateSet: "2025-01-15"
    statusSet: Backlog
  - dateSet: "2025-02-20"
    statusSet: Active
    deadlineSet: "2025-04-30"
  - dateSet: "2025-02-28"
    comment: "Deadline extended due to scope changes"
    deadlineSet: "2025-05-15"
---

1. Download main.js and manifest.json from the latest release
2. Create a folder .obsidian/plugins/property-logs/ in your vault
3. Place both files in that folder
4. Reload Obsidian or restart it
5. Go to Settings → Community Plugins and enable Property Logs

Alternatively, install via BRAT (Obsidian plugin manager):

1. Install BRAT and enable it
2. Add the repository: https://github.com/connradolisboa/status-logger
3. Enable Property Logs in Community Plugins

Open Settings → Property Logs to configure Filters, Behavior, Daily Note Log, Dashboards, Values, Periodic Notes, Chart Defaults, and About.

Control which notes the plugin monitors:

Examples:

• Track only files in the Projects folder: Add Projects to Included Folders
• Track all files except archive: Add Archive to Excluded Folders
• Track files tagged with tracked and important: Add both to Included Tags
• Track everything except files tagged no-log: Add no-log to Excluded Tags

Customize logging behavior and property names.

Customize the frontmatter keys used in history entries:

Change these if your vault uses different naming conventions (e.g., use timestamp instead of dateSet).

Beyond status, track any other frontmatter property. Specify:

• Frontmatter key — The property name in your note (e.g., deadline, priority, assignee)
• History key — The key to use in history entries (e.g., deadlineSet, prioritySet)

Example: To track deadline changes alongside status:

• Add Frontmatter key: deadline
• Add History key: deadlineSet

When the deadline property changes, it appears in the history entry:

- dateSet: "2025-02-28"
  deadlineSet: "2025-05-15"
  comment: "Deadline extended"

Mirror tracked property changes into your daily note. When a watched property changes on a file, a configurable line is appended to today's daily note — useful for skimming what moved each day without opening every project.

If the core Daily Notes plugin is enabled, its folder and date format are used automatically — the fallback values only apply when it's disabled.

Each group routes notes tagged with a given tag to a specific log template. The first group whose tag matches the changed note wins. If no group matches, nothing is logged.

Example template:

- {{time}} {{link}} — {{key}}: {{from}} → {{to}}

When the status on a note tagged project flips from Backlog to Active, the daily note gets:

- 14:32 [[Launch new website]] — status: Backlog → Active

Pre-fill defaults when inserting charts. These are automatically updated each time you insert a chart with custom parameters.

Create one or more saved timeline dashboards. Each dashboard has independent configuration for:

Clicking a note on the timeline opens a value picker. Choosing a mapped value or entering free text updates both the note's live property and its existing history array. Choosing a value mapped to level 0 hides the new segment without deleting history.

The plugin adds five commands (accessible via Ctrl/Cmd+P command palette):

Opens a saved Property Logs timeline. If more than one dashboard exists, a fuzzy picker lets you choose one. The same action is available from the ribbon.

From the dashboard you can:

• Group and sort rows without leaving the view
• Switch between level and property coloring
• Open a note from its row label
• Click a note to update the tracked value
• Add an eligible existing note or create a new note and set its initial value

The timeline uses the bundled vis-timeline renderer; no companion plugin is required.

Inserts a property-logs code block at the cursor. See Embedding a dashboard.

Copies a dashboard — scope, mappings, colors, and layout — under a new name and opens the copy. The same action is available from the Dashboards settings tab and from the dashboard's overflow menu.

Opens a modal to configure and insert a dataviewjs chart block.

Parameters:

• Folder — Filter pages by vault folder path (e.g., Projects). Leave blank for all folders.
• Tags — Filter pages by tags, comma-separated without # (e.g., area, project). Leave blank for all tags.
• Period — Time interval for the X-axis: Week, Month, Quarter, or Year
• Start date — Start of the date range (YYYY-MM-DD)
• End date — End of the date range (YYYY-MM-DD)

The chart is inserted as a dataviewjs code block at your cursor position.

Requirements: Dataview and Obsidian Charts must be installed and enabled.

Opens a modal to add a timestamped comment to the current note's history.

Comments are logged to the same history entry as status changes on the same day (or create a new entry if no status change occurred). Useful for annotating why a status changed or adding context to a property change.

Add a code block to any note:

```property-logs
dashboard: Topics
date: auto
zoom: auto
```

In a periodic note the embed centers on that note's date and zooms to match its type: a daily note shows a few weeks, a monthly note shows a couple of quarters. Spans per note type are configured in the Periodic Notes tab, and zoom: overrides them for a single block.

Because the embed reads the period from the note the block is rendered for, it also works with Virtual Content: put the code block in a Virtual Content rule for your daily notes and every daily note gets a dashboard centered on its own date without touching the files.

An embed holds the space it will take and builds itself as you scroll near it, so a note carrying several of them opens at once and nothing shifts underneath as each one fills in.

groupBy, sortBy, and sortAscending affect only that code block; they never change the saved dashboard. For example:

```property-logs
dashboard: Projects
groupBy: property:areas
sortBy: property:priority
sortAscending: false
scroll: true
height: 320
```

With the Journals plugin installed, the calendar axis above the timeline is clickable:

• Day cells open the daily note
• Week cells (labelled with the ISO week number) open the weekly note
• Month, quarter, and year cells open their notes

Journals creates the note if it does not exist yet. Without Journals, day cells fall back to the core Daily Notes plugin and the other levels report that no journal is configured. Week dividers follow the week start configured in the Periodic Notes tab.

A task line in a periodic note becomes a note on the timeline at that note's date:

- [n] Today I've been feeling well about this
- [!] Deployment slipped again
- [?] Is the new scope realistic

Each marker gets its own icon and color, configured in the Periodic Notes tab, which start out as n (note), ! (important), ? (question), i (info), * (highlight), and b (bookmark). Markers use Obsidian's checkbox syntax, so the same characters your theme styles as custom checkboxes work here, and the rendered note carries a data-task attribute for further styling. Plain - [ ] and - [x] lines are ignored.

Notes are truncated on the timeline and show the full text on hover; clicking one opens the source note on that line. Editing a periodic note leaves open dashboards alone until the typing pauses, and only redraws them when a marked line or a tracked property actually changed. If the line links to a note that has its own row — - [n] [[Project Atlas]] shipped the beta — the note attaches to that row instead of the shared journal lane; while that row is folded it goes back to the lane, since a folded row has no space to draw it.

A note is its name in small type and a hairline in the note's colour running to the end of the period. How that line ends says whether the value did: an arrowhead means the note still holds it, an upright bar means it stopped there. When a note moves directly between two visible, non-zero values, a curved arrow links the end of its old line to the start of its new one. A transition through level 0 deliberately has no link because that value is hidden. Names are clipped rather than wrapped, so several notes read side by side across the same week, and names that would collide stack, so a row grows only as far as its notes need. Hovering a name grows it back to a readable size with the row properties it carries; a hint with the note name, its value, its dates, and those properties follows shortly after.

status keeps the familiar flat status rows. Grouping by a folder, level, property:<key>, or file.tags adds a foldable outer group, with foldable tracked-value/status rows inside it. For example, groupBy: property:areas draws Personal → Active, Personal → Backlog, and so on. A multi-value property places a note in each matching group; blank or missing values use No value. file.tags reads Obsidian’s file tags, while property:tags reads the literal frontmatter property.

Every outer group and status subgroup carries a fold toggle. Folding replaces the full note blocks with compact timeline lanes, which keeps a long dashboard readable while still showing each note's actual span. Fold state is saved per dashboard, and the overflow menu can fold or unfold everything at once.

A folded row draws one thin line per note range and puts overlapping ranges on separate lanes. Lanes are reused once a range ends, so a folded row grows only with the number of simultaneous notes. The line itself stays text-free; hover it to see the note name, value, and dates, and click it using the dashboard's normal open/edit gesture.

The shared journal lane follows the same compact-line treatment when folded.

When a note has a current tracked value but no entry for that property in its history array—for example, a newly created note with status: Active—the dashboard still draws that value. Its segment begins at the dashboard's Start date property, then the global Dashboard start date property, and finally the file creation date. Date properties use YYYY-MM-DD; blank, invalid, or future dates safely fall back to the creation date. Existing property history remains authoritative.

The Values tab sets a level and color per property value for the whole vault, so Active means the same thing on every dashboard. A dashboard's own value mapping or color always overrides the global one, and the "Tracked value" color mode colors bars by the value itself rather than by level.

Dashboards and embeds adapt to narrow screens: the toolbar wraps and scrolls, rows and labels shrink, and controls use touch-sized targets. On mobile, tapping a journal note opens a menu with the full text and a link to the source note, since there is no hover. Full-tab dashboards support pinch-to-zoom; embedded dashboards stay still so the note keeps scrolling normally, and their header buttons handle zooming.

The chart recognizes these standard status values. They map to numeric levels for visualization:

Use any other status values; they'll appear as blank on the chart but are still logged in history.

• Multi-line visualization — Each note becomes a line on the chart, colored by its color frontmatter field
• Supported colors — Todoist color names (e.g., blue, green, grape, red, orange) or hex codes (e.g., #FF5733)
• Baseline value — Notes with no history yet show as Inactive
• Future periods — Notes created after a period's end don't appear for earlier periods
• Shape markers — Special point shapes distinguish Inactive (●), New (▲), and Cancelled (✕)
• Time spanning — Chart spans entire date range even if some notes have no data

Set up tracking for projects in the Projects folder:

1. Add Projects to Included Folders in settings
2. Add a status field to project notes: status: Backlog
3. Change the status as work progresses → The plugin logs each change automatically
4. Run Insert Status Chart and filter by folder Projects to visualize progress

Monitor both status and deadline for tasks:

1. In Additional Tracked Properties, add:
   • Frontmatter key: deadline → History key: deadlineSet
   • Frontmatter key: priority → History key: prioritySet
2. Add to your notes:

   status: Backlog
   deadline: "2025-04-30"
   priority: P2

3. When either deadline or priority changes, both appear in the history:

   - dateSet: "2025-02-28"
     statusSet: Active
     deadlineSet: "2025-05-15"
     prioritySet: P1

Track all project notes except archived ones:

1. Add Projects to Included Folders
2. Add Archive to Excluded Folders
3. Now only active project notes in Projects are tracked (excluding Projects/Archive)

Track only notes tagged with tracked:

1. Add tracked to Included Tags
2. Leave folders empty
3. Only notes with the tracked tag will be monitored

Add the tag to any note you want to monitor, regardless of folder.

• Separate concerns — Use included folders for broad scoping (e.g., all projects) and tags for fine-grained control (e.g., only "high-visibility" projects)
• Comments for context — Use "Add comment to note" to annotate why a status changed for later review
• Consolidate same-day changes — Enable "Overwrite same-day entries" if you frequently adjust properties and only care about the final state per day
• Chart filtering — Always check the chart command's folder/tags to ensure you're visualizing the right subset of notes
• Baseline stability — The first time a property is seen becomes the baseline (not logged). Subsequent changes are logged. This prevents spurious entries when enabling tracking on an existing note

• Charts require Dataview and Obsidian Charts plugins
• Status values outside the standard set (Inactive, Backlog, Ongoing, Active, Done, etc.) won't be charted but are still logged
• Charts don't currently support filtering by multiple status values simultaneously
• Property changes are logged based on metadata cache updates; changes not reflected in the cache may not be detected

• Non-destructive — All frontmatter edits use Obsidian's processFrontMatter API
• Persistent state — Baseline property values are saved to plugin data, so tracking state survives vault restarts
• Metadata cache — The plugin listens to metadata cache changes, so updates are instant within Obsidian
• No external APIs — All logging and charting happens locally in your vault

Found a bug or have a feature request? Open an issue on GitHub.

ISC