Context Menu Actions

Context Menu Actions

Draft Bench adds several actions to Obsidian's right-click menu. They cover creating new projects, scenes, and drafts, plus retrofitting existing notes that predate your adoption of the plugin.

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Creation actions

• Create Draft Bench project (on a folder): opens the new-project modal.
• New chapter in project (inside a chapter-aware project, or a project that has no children yet): opens the new-chapter modal. Refused on chapter-less projects that have direct scenes — move those scenes into chapters first.
• New scene in project (inside a project folder): opens the new-scene modal.
• New draft of this scene (on a scene note): snapshots current prose and carries it forward.
• New draft of this chapter (on a chapter note): snapshots the chapter body plus all child scenes concatenated with boundary markers; see Drafts and Versioning § Chapter drafts.
• Move to chapter (on a scene whose project has chapters): opens a chapter picker; reassigns the scene's dbench-chapter parent. Single-file scope in V1.
• Set status (on a project, chapter, or scene): quick status change.
• Reorder scenes / Reorder chapters (anywhere inside a project): opens the appropriate reorder modal.

Retrofit actions for existing notes

If you have notes you created before installing Draft Bench — existing short stories, drafts, project overviews — you can bring them under plugin management without recreating them.

Set as project / chapter / scene / draft

For notes that don't yet have a dbench-type property, Set as... stamps the appropriate essentials in one step. The note becomes a typed project, chapter, scene, or draft — with a dbench-id, the right type, and empty placeholder wikilinks where needed.

Set as chapter is refused on a chapter-less project that has direct scenes (the no-mixed-children rule from Projects, Chapters, and Scenes). Move those scenes into chapters first via the Move to chapter action.

Complete essential properties

For notes that already have dbench-type but are missing other essentials (e.g., dbench-id, dbench-status), Complete essential properties fills in only the missing fields. It never overwrites existing values.

Add identifier

Standalone action — adds only the stable dbench-id. Useful for notes that have type information but predate the ID system, or when you want just the ID without other essentials.

Scopes

All retrofit actions work at three scopes:

• Single files: right-click on one note in the file explorer or editor.
• Multi-selections: select multiple notes in the file explorer, right-click.
• Folders: right-click on a folder; the action applies to all markdown files inside, recursively. Useful for onboarding an entire existing project at once.

Behavior guarantees

• Idempotent. Running an action twice is identical to running it once.
• Never overwrites. Existing frontmatter values are preserved unconditionally.
• Smart menu visibility. Actions only appear in the menu when they would actually change something: a fully-stamped note shows no retrofit entries.
• Empty placeholders for unresolvable wikilinks. When Set as scene runs on a note that can't be automatically attached to a project, dbench-project is stamped as an empty string. Fill it in via the Properties panel; a Phase 2 picker modal will streamline this.

Feedback

Actions emit a summary notice:

• Single file: "Set as scene" / "Already a scene" / "Failed to apply properties."
• Multi-file or folder: "Set as scene: 5 updated, 3 already typed, 1 error."

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More detail and examples coming once V1 ships.