Setting your desired update policy. Update, Append, Magic or Smart Insert!

Table of Contents:

• Overview
• Using the Magic Policy
• Using the Smart Insert Policy 

Overview  

BookFusion uniquely offers precise control over your Obsidian vault updates, with three policies that include:

• Append: Updates get added to the end of the file.
• Replace: Overwrites file with new content.
• Magic : New notes/highlights are inserted based on their natural order and modified highlights updated. Useful for those that want to make edits to the synced markdown that want those retained and might also at a later date add/update notes that were made inside BookFusion
• Smart Insert: New notes/highlights are inserted based on their natural order without replacing any existing content. This is useful for those that tend to make changes to previously synced highlights in the markdown and do not want them overwritten but would like for new highlights to be inserted in the correct place. 

This exclusive feature sets us apart, providing unmatched flexibility in managing your Obsidian content updates.

To set your desired update policy you need to do the following:

1. Go to the Obsidian integration page inside BookFusion 

2. Go to the  Update Policy block section on that page 

3. Select your desired update policy. That is it! 

Using the Magic Policy

Magic is the default policy when you start to use BookFusion. As mentioned above, this policy is used by those that want to keep personal notes inside the markdown while having new highlights inserted into the correct location and changes to highlights on BookFusion synced to Obsidian. 

This only applies if you changed from a previous update policy to magic or just want to understand how the magic update policy works. 

To start using the Magic Update Policy you have to do a fresh sync of your markdown files. To do this delete your markdown files for the books you are interested in testing or just the entire BookFusion folder. Remember to also Clear synchronization state by going to the plugin settings.

1. You might notice that each highlight and section are enclosed with a %%begin- xxx and %%end-xxx tag . These tags determine the the blocks or areas that will get updated . 

2. To insert your own notes before or after a highlight that was synced you need to just insert those notes outside of these start and end  %% tags. This was you can insert your own notes into the synced markdown and have them persist/remain across consecutive updates in a single file while allowing changes made to your highlights and notes inside BookFusion to be synced 

Using the Smart Insert Policy

Smart Insert might be the next or potentially most used policy as it follows the natural highlighting and annotation patterns of readers. 

There are no special instructions for using Smart Insert as old highlights and notes added to the markdown and any changes will persist between updates.  New highlights will simply be inserted into the natural position that they occurred in the text that you were reading.  Say goodbye to append only workflows.