Help with error handling for shortcut to create, open and append to daily notes

[hqlmmst]

Hey there!

Problem #1: Error handling opening daily notes

I’m having problems with error handling to open daily notes. Currently, I have the shortcut below to open my daily note. Its title is in ISO format (“2025-08-11”) and I’m using an if condition to search the date in the title. The reason I have to do this is because “Open the note” function will fail and stop the shortcut if the note doesn’t exist.

However, because I’m using the search method, it may return a false positive if I have another note with the date in the title.

If I only had the note “2025-08-11 meeting”, my shortcut above would consider the daily note exist, and open the meeting note.

I have experimented with x-callback-url to replace the shortcut above, and I have found it to work consistently due to x-error. I can search for the exact string (“2025-08-11”) and if it doesn’t exist, it will create one with my predefined template.

Great. Problem solved! But then it leads to problem #2, where I still need an error handling for the existence of a daily note for appending text to my daily note.

Problem #2: Appending to daily note

Below is the shortcut I’m using to append to daily note, which works only if I have a daily note created. If I don’t, the shortcut fails. (Side note: when running this, it will also open the note, but not in edit mode (unlike x-callback-url parameter). It’s annoying to have to press into the note again to start writing).

I could add the if statement I had above for error handling, but the false positive problem would still exist.

I tried building an x-callback-url for this, but I found that “/add-note” would create the note if I specified the title (regardless if it exists or not), so I would have a daily note without my template, but with the appended text. It wouldn’t fallback to x-error to create the note first with my template, then append the text I want to append.

Summary

1. Shortcut 1: I want to open a daily note. If it doesn’t exist, create one with template.
2. Shortcut 2: I want to append text into my daily note. If daily note doesn’t exist, create one with template and append the text.
3. Issue is mainly with error handling: How do I determine that the daily note exists without false positives?

Does anybody have any idea how I should go about this? Thank you so much for taking the time to read. Really appreciate any help I can get.

[trix180]

1. Check if the note title is exactly what you expect in the first if. You also want to use a Boolean variable and set it accordingly inside the new if and the otherwise, so you can create the note if true in another if after.
2. If I’m not mistaken, this is the same problem as above. Regarding editing, I can suggest using the xcallback URL /open with the edit flag.
3. Same as 1.

[hqlmmst]

Oh my god. I’m so stupid. Rather than counting the results, I should’ve compared the search note result’s title with the variable ‘date’ (or add it as another condition after evaluating if it has a result or not). Will try that!

OTOH, for #2, if we could have an edit flag inside the open note shortcut action, that would be nice

Thank you so much!

[hqlmmst]

Okay, I’ve already implemented it as below. So far it seems to be working (but also seems inelegant)

Thank you so much!