Obsidian - On This Day Query Using Obsidian Bases Feature

Obsidian’s Bases feature can recreate an “On This Day” view for Daily notes—showing the same month/day across multiple years—while also surfacing custom frontmatter properties like sleep, lunch, dinner, and exercise more cleanly than Data Views. The key payoff is that the Bases-based table can update dynamically with the “current” date, so the list shifts automatically from June 7 to June 8 (or any other day) without manually editing the query each time.

The walkthrough starts by comparing two approaches. A Data Views setup can filter Daily notes by folder and date, pulling up entries from the same historical day in descending order. But getting the custom properties to appear is awkward: Data Views may only reveal those fields on hover, whereas Bases makes them readily visible in the table. Bases also feels simpler to wire up for property display, and it supports a more interactive workflow—pressing a command reveals the underlying text content tied to those properties.

The tradeoff is timing behavior. The Data Views version requires manual updates to keep “today” aligned with the real calendar date, because the query logic doesn’t automatically track the current day in the same way. Bases, by contrast, can be made dynamic: it reads the month and day from “now,” compares them to the month and day encoded in each Daily note’s filename, and filters to only the matching historical entries.

From there, the tutorial builds the setup step by step. First, it creates a Base that indexes all files in the vault, then filters it down to the Daily folder. Next, it ensures the relevant properties (sleep, lunch, dinner, exercise, plus any text fields) are included so they populate as new daily notes are added.

With the Base in place, the next step is creating a specialized view—duplicating the table layout into an “On This Day” table. A new property, “on this day formula,” is added. That formula extracts the current month and day using date functions (e.g., month and day from “now”), extracts the month and day from the file name (e.g., the numeric month/day segments in names like 67, 68, 69, or similar), and then uses nested IF conditions to return true only when both month and day match. A filter then keeps only rows where the formula evaluates to true.

The result is a table that automatically aggregates every Daily note matching the selected month/day across years—turning a scattered set of daily logs into a consistent “same day, different year” dashboard. The walkthrough demonstrates this by changing the simulated current date to the 8th and showing that the view immediately switches from June 7 entries to June 8 entries. Finally, it notes that the finished query can be copied from the description, and that additional properties can be added or hidden to tidy the layout.