Org-roam function to find file name based on title

Development
1

Hello, folks.

I’m working on some Org Roam capture templates for my semi-GTD flow. I’d like to have a template that drops a TODO into the doc titled “Inbox” but I cannot seem to find an org-roam function that can find the filename based on the title. Another option might be to find the correct file using a substring match of the file name but that sort of punches down through the Org Roam abstraction layer and I’d prefer not to do so.

Thoughts?

Thx!

2

If you have only one inbox file (doc?), you can create it with any finename (e.g. inbox.org) using find-file (or whatever), give title “Inbox” and ID; it will become a normal Org-roam node.

You can find the filename from a title via the node instance. But that seems to be overkill if you can just create a file like above.

3

Hey, thanks for the reply. The Inbox file (and others GTD-related) were created from within org-roam and they have dates embedded in file name. To your point, I guess I could rename the files as just “Inbox.org”.

I may do just that if there’s not an easy way to query them. Can you elaborate on the node instance scenario? As in what functions I might use?

thx

4

I’d just change the filename.

For “instantiating” a node, have a look at this part of the manual
https://www.orgroam.com/manual.html#Accessing-and-Modifying-Nodes

There are also examples in the wiki on GitHub repo.

Alternatively, you could look into org-roam-node-from-title-or-alias.

5

As Nobiot said, I’d probably just rename the file or find the ID yourself, but there is a way to it. Here’s a function which does that:

(defun org-roam-find-file-by-title (title)
    "Find the corresponding file of a node with title TITLE if it is unique."
   (if-let ((node (org-roam-node-from-title-or-alias title)))
             (org-roam-node-file node)
            nil))

Can’t promise that it doesn’t break (org-roam-node-from-title-or-alias errors on duplicate filenames) or that it’s fast, but it does work.