Anki database adventures: Counting notes by model type

anki

Continuing my series on accessing the Anki database outside of the Anki application environment, here’s a piece on accessing the note type model. You may wish to start here with the first article on accessing the Anki database. This is geared toward mac OS. (If you’re not on mac OS, then start here instead.)

The note type model

Since notes contain flexible fields in Anki, the model for a note type is in JSON. The best guess definition of the JSON is:

{
    "css": "CSS, shared for all templates",
    "did":
        "Long specifying the id of the deck that cards are added to by default",
    "flds": [
       "JSONArray containing object for each field in the model as follows:",
       {
         "font": "display font",
         "media": "array of media. appears to be unused",
         "name": "field name",
         "ord": "ordinal of the field - goes from 0 to num fields -1",
         "rtl": "boolean, right-to-left script",
         "size": "font size",
         "sticky": "sticky fields retain the value that was last added \
                    when adding new notes"
      }
    ],
    "id": "model ID, matches cards.mid",
    "latexPost": "String added to end of LaTeX expressions",
    "latexPre": "preamble for LaTeX expressions",
    "mod": "modification time in milliseconds",
    "name": "model name",
    "req": [
      "Array of arrays describing which fields are required \
       for each card to be generated",
      [
        "array index, 0, 1, ...",
        "? string, all",
        "another array",
        ["appears to be the array index again"]
      ]
    ],
    "sortf": "Integer specifying which field is used for sorting (browser)",
    "tags": "Anki saves the tags of the last added note to the current model",
    "tmpls": [
      "JSONArray containing object of CardTemplate for each card in model",
      {
        "afmt": "answer template string",
        "bafmt": "browser answer format: used for displaying answer in browser",
        "bqfmt": "browser question format: \
                  used for displaying question in browser",
        "did": "deck override (null by default)",
        "name": "template name",
        "ord": "template number, see flds",
        "qfmt": "question format string"
      }
    ],
    "type": "Integer specifying what type of model. 0 for standard, 1 for cloze",
    "usn": "Update sequence number: used in same way as other usn vales in db",
    "vers": "Legacy version number (unused)"
}

Our goal today is to count all of the notes that have a given note type. Fortunately, there’s a built-in method for this:

verbModel = col.models.byName(u'Русский - глагол')

Here we find the model object (a Python dictionary) named ‘Русский - глагол’ (that’s Russian verb, by the way.) To access its id:

modelID = verbModel['id']

Now we just have to count:

query = """SELECT COUNT(id) from notes WHERE mid = {}""".format(verbModel['id'])
verbNotes = col.db.scalar(query)

print 'There are {:.5g} verb notes.'.format(verbNotes)

And that’s it for this little adventure in the Anki database.

See also: