Show all references

How can I see that there are references of an item?

There’s no visual indicator before you use that option, for now.

In the future, “We’re aware that this option still requires some work before you can see “what links here”. We plan to add an area for backlinks under the currently zoomed-in item, so you don’t have to leave your current context (it will need to be turned on with an option).” - from our blog post today: https://blog.dynalist.io/2020-january-update/

Is this also as preparation for allowing to move page trees to other documents while keeping the incoming links working?

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This would be really great productivity booster. Then I can can move my project tasks from inside the project move to my task list for next steps or today and have not think about more!!

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Although these two things are related, I don’t think it’s “as preparation” for the change you’re talking about (do you mean “as preparation” like “finishing a prerequisite” in the technical sense?).

It’s merely a shortcut – you can do a “get link” yourself and a global search before and produce the same result. The biggest obstacle of that is by updating all the links, there is going to be a change across all documents that cannot be undone, which is what we need to think through right now. It’s for the same reason that tags can only be renamed locally, and search and replace only works within a document. We want you to be able to undo any change with Ctrl+Z, but that does not work across documents right now.

I hope that clears thing up!

Oh, do I get this right, I can not split my documents into multiple without breaking all my links currently?

Yep, I was thinking of this functionality being a (technical) enabler for the mentioned feature.

I understand your obstacle about not being able to undo changes across documents. For such a feature I would personally be ok to not have such a global undo capability. It would be sufficient to have a warning/confirmation dialog - ideally showing the affected documents - before executing such a content tree move. That said, having global undo (i.e. cross-document transaction) would really be cool, considering also your other examples.

Yes, that’s what @Jan_Hutter1’s current pain point.

Yep, that’s what we came to conclusion internally as well. Show a confirmation dialog when links will be updated. Added to our todo list!

I agree global undo feature would be cool, but I think it’s more required for the split screen feature rather than this one. When you’re updating links, without a dialog you won’t know the link updating is happening, so I doubt anyone would try to undo the change they don’t perceive in the first place. It’s more like a background process and as long as we do it right, it shouldn’t affect anything.

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@Jan_Hutter1: is there a bug/feature request for this already? I’d appreciate it if it can have its own thread so we can track it properly. Having it in a “Help” post is not too off-topic but it certainly doesn’t help people with similar needs find it.

Yes, in fact there is. I created it a while ago: Display "Incoming links" or allow "extract as document"

Thank you linking me to it! I’ll attach that to our internal ticket.

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