Note-to-note relationships (Hack)

[RY27 21]

If you want to relate one note to another note or have a parent-child relationship among several notes without messing with tags or TOC feature, you can do the following:

1. Copy the internal link of your "parent" note
2. Paste the link into the parent note's SourceUrl (using Ctrl + I shortcut and scrolling through the other options) 
3. Create a "child" note 
4. Paste the same parent link into the child note's SourceUrl field. 

What this will allow you to do:

• Immediately Return to the parent note from each child note by clicking the sourceurl (works on iOS as well) 
  • with TOC you only get a one-way link to the child notes, but no way to get back to the parent note from a child note (except for the back button)
• Search for all related notes by searching for SourceUrl of the parent note 
  • type in sourceurl:"[insert internal link of the parent]" in the search field 
• Create AHK shortcuts to create child notes and to search for related notes
• Avoid creating throw-away tags just to quickly relate a few notes to each other
• Especially useful for implementing a GTD workflow where a project note can have many related next actions or tasks (each of which can be tracked and tagged independently)

Here are the AHK scripts that let you do the above quickly:

//press Ctr+Y to quickly edit SourceUrl of a note 

#IfWinActive, ahk_exe evernote.exe

 ^y::
    Send ^+{i}
    Sleep 500
    Send  {tab}{tab}{tab}{tab}
    Sleep 500
    Send ^{a}

Return 

//press Ctr+S to quickly create a child note that will inherit the parent note's url 

#IfWinActive, ahk_exe evernote.exe
^s::
    Send ^!{l}
    Send ^{n}
    Sleep 1000
    Send ^+{i}
    Sleep 500
    Send  {tab}{tab}{tab}{tab}
    Sleep 500
    Send ^{a}
    Send ^{v}
    Sleep 500
    Send {ENTER}
Return

//press Ctr+L to quickly find all related notes (that share the parent's source url) - you need to have the parent note selected for this to work. 

#IfWinActive, ahk_exe evernote.exe
^l::
    Send ^!{l}
    Send {F6}
    Send sourceurl:"
    Send ^{v}
    Send "
Return

[DTLow 5,736]

 

Source URL is an interesting option to idea the parent URL.  
I just paste the parent link into the child note content area.
The same thing is accomplished by dragging a note into another; a link is inserted

I also set up the links as a tab emulation.

 

 

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

3 hours ago, RY27 said:

If you want to relate one note to another note or have a parent-child relationship among several notes without messing with tags or TOC feature, you can do the following:

1. Copy the internal link of your "parent" note
2. Paste the link into the parent note's SourceUrl (using Ctrl + I shortcut and scrolling through the other options) 
3. Create a "child" note 
4. Paste the same parent link into the child note's SourceUrl field. 

I like your idea.  Unfortunately a stumbling block for me is that many of my Notes already use the SourceUrl field to point to the actual web page source for the Note.

I really wish that Evernote would support the notion of child Notes (records) that is so common among most full featured PIMs.  It would be awesome to have a "Child Notes" tab in the UI that list all of the child Notes, using the same list UI that is used for Notes in general.  Of course, each Child Note could then become a Parent Note, and have its own children.

[RY27 21]

51 minutes ago, JMichaelTX said:

Unfortunately a stumbling block for me is that many of my Notes already use the SourceUrl field to point to the actual web page source for the Note.

Yes, that's certainly a limitation. I think just having a custom field that we could use would help a lot, as opposed to trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.

[RY27 21]

3 hours ago, DTLow said:

I just paste the parent link into the child note content area.
The same thing is accomplished by dragging a note into another; a link is inserted

I also set up the links as a tab emulation.

 

 

That certainly works, too. Perhaps I was overthinking this a bit. I just liked having the links in a separate space from the note content itself .

How do you get the note links to show up like that? 

Also, using this method, can you set up a search to show the parent and all of its children? (I find it helpful to set up a GTD Project as a parent note and Next Actions as children, so when I run the search above I can easily see what project I'm working on and what needs to be done).

 

 

[RY27 21]

1 hour ago, JMichaelTX said:

really wish that Evernote would support the notion of child Notes (records) that is so common among most full featured PIMs.  It would be awesome to have a "Child Notes" tab in the UI that list all of the child Notes, using the same list UI that is used for Notes in general.  Of course, each Child Note could then become a Parent Note, and have its own children.

Have you looked into RightNote? It does pretty much that and syncs with Evernote. The UI is a bit Windows 97 and it's only available on a PC, so I haven't used it for anything significant.

[DTLow 5,736]

11 hours ago, RY27 said:

Also, using this method, can you set up a search to show the parent and all of its children? (I find it helpful to set up a GTD Project as a parent note and Next Actions as children.

No, the same url is there but it's hidden in the underlying html code

My process is to have a tag for each project (Project-aaaaaaa)

All notes for the project are assigned the project tag 
Using the tag, a search lists all the project notes
Title sequence is used; task titles are prefixed with +; NextActions with ++

>>when I run the search above I can easily see what project I'm working on and what needs to be done

For project reviews, I start with a search of my project master notes; tag:!Type-Project -Tag:!Archive,, then drill down with the project tag search

My current task list is a search  based on task dates: reminderOrder:* -reminderTime:day+1 -reminderDoneTime:*

>>How do you get the note links to show up like that? 

My tab emulation?  It's just a one row table with the note links pasted into the cells.

[RY27 21]

Thank you, DTLow, that's very helpful. 

On 2/26/2019 at 9:30 PM, DTLow said:

My process is to have a tag for each project

So do you just keep the project tags or do you delete them eventually?

[DTLow 5,736]

37 minutes ago, RY27 said:

So do you just keep the project tags or do you delete them eventually?

I do not delete tags; this would be disuptive

For archiving, I prefix the tagname; for example !Project-Testing becomes !Project-xTesting
This doesn't remove the tag from the list, but it sorts to the bottom and is easily ignred

[gazumped 11,652]

On 2/27/2019 at 4:01 AM, RY27 said:

Have you looked into RightNote? It does pretty much that and syncs with Evernote.

Hmmn.  How did I miss that app until now?  Thanks for the information - playing with it already. 

(I use a now very "traditional" (=dated-looking) Treepad alongside Evernote for my occasional hierarchical needs,  but this app looks like a much slicker and more modern version...)