How‑to: Stop attribute inheritance from propagating to child pages, only keep it for direct children of Projects table

[ZangXincz]

Hello TriliumNext community,

I've created a table note named Projects with several label attributes such as State.

The direct child notes under Projects correctly inherit these attributes, which is the behavior I want.

However, when I create pages inside a project note (child‑of‑child, nested one level deeper), those nested child notes also inherit the attributes from the parent.

I do NOT want these deeper‑level child files to inherit the attributes.
I only want the immediate project children of the Projects note to inherit and display these properties at the top of their note.

Is there a setting or workaround to achieve this?
Thank you.

[dosubot[bot]]

@ZangXincz great question! The behavior you're seeing is by design — when an attribute is marked inheritable on a parent note, it propagates to all descendants, not just direct children. The __getInheritableAttributes method walks the full parent chain recursively with no depth limit [1].

The fix: use a template instead of inheritable attributes on Projects.

1. Create a template note (e.g. Project Template) that owns the State label (and any other attributes you want) as non-inheritable attributes.
2. On each direct child of Projects, add a ~template relation pointing to that template note.

This works because template attribute inheritance is a runtime resolution mechanism — when Trilium reads a note's attributes, it dynamically walks the note's ~template relations and merges the template's attributes into the effective set [2]. Since those attributes are not marked inheritable, they will appear on the project note itself but will not cascade into its sub-pages.

Alternatively, you can simply remove the inheritable flag from the attributes on your Projects table note and add State directly to each project child (manually or via the template approach above). The key point is that Trilium's inheritance is all-or-nothing in terms of depth — there's no way to limit it to one level [3]. The template approach is the cleanest workaround.

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[eliandoran]

One key aspect of template is that it can be coupled with copy inheritance.

Apply ~child:template to the Projects note, and all new notes created in Projects will always carry the template.

[ZangXincz]

Yes, the function I wanted has been successfully achieved by following the method above.