Skip to content

Data Commands

The different commands that dataview queries can be made up of. Commands are executed in order, and you can have duplicate commands (so multiple WHERE blocks or multiple GROUP BY blocks, for example).

FROM

The FROM statement determines what pages will initially be collected and passed onto the other commands for further filtering. You can select from any source, which currently means by folder, by tag, or by incoming/outgoing links.

  • Tags: To select from a tag (and all its subtags), use FROM #tag.
  • Folders: To select from a folder (and all its subfolders), use FROM "folder".
  • Single Files: To select from a single file, use FROM "path/to/file".
  • Links: You can either select links TO a file, or all links FROM a file.
  • To obtain all pages which link TO [[note]], use FROM [[note]].
  • To obtain all pages which link FROM [[note]] (i.e., all the links in that file), use FROM outgoing([[note]]).

You can compose these filters in order to get more advanced sources using and and or.

  • For example, #tag and "folder" will return all pages in folder and with #tag.
  • [[Food]] or [[Exercise]] will give any pages which link to [[Food]] OR [[Exercise]].

You can also "negate" sources to obtain anything that does NOT match a source using -:

  • -#tag will exclude files which have the given tag.
  • #tag and -"folder" will only include files tagged #tag which are NOT in "folder".

WHERE

Filter pages on fields. Only pages where the clause evaluates to true will be yielded.

WHERE <clause>

  1. Obtain all files which were modified in the last 24 hours:

    LIST WHERE file.mtime >= date(today) - dur(1 day)

  2. Find all projects which are not marked complete and are more than a month old:

    LIST FROM #projects
WHERE !completed AND file.ctime <= date(today) - dur(1 month)

SORT

Sorts all results by one or more fields.

SORT date [ASCENDING/DESCENDING/ASC/DESC]

You can also give multiple fields to sort by. Sorting will be done based on the first field. Then, if a tie occurs, the second field will be used to sort the tied fields. If there is still a tie, the third sort will resolve it, and so on.

SORT field1 [ASCENDING/DESCENDING/ASC/DESC], ..., fieldN [ASC/DESC]

GROUP BY

Group all results on a field. Yields one row per unique field value, which has 2 properties: one corresponding to the field being grouped on, and a rows array field which contains all of the pages that matched.

GROUP BY field
GROUP BY (computed_field) AS name

In order to make working with the rows array easier, Dataview supports field "swizzling". If you want the field test from every object in the rows array, then rows.test will automatically fetch the test field from every object in rows, yielding a new array. You can then apply aggregation operators like sum() or flat() over the resulting array.

FLATTEN

Flatten an array in every row, yielding one result row per entry in the array.

FLATTEN field
FLATTEN (computed_field) AS name

For example, flatten the authors field in each literature note to give one row per author:

TABLE authors FROM #LiteratureNote
FLATTEN authors
File authors
stegEnvironmentalPsychologyIntroduction2018 SN Steg, L.
stegEnvironmentalPsychologyIntroduction2018 SN Van den Berg, A. E.
stegEnvironmentalPsychologyIntroduction2018 SN De Groot, J. I. M.
Soap Dragons SN Robert Lamb
Soap Dragons SN Joe McCormick
smithPainAssaultSelf2007 SN Jonathan A. Smith
smithPainAssaultSelf2007 SN Mike Osborn

A good use of this would be when there is a deeply nested list that you want to use more easily. For example, file.lists or file.tasks. Note the simpler query though the end results are slightly different (grouped vs non-grouped). You can use a GROUP BY file.link to achieve identical results but would need to use rows.T.text as described earlier.

table T.text as "Task Text"
from "Scratchpad"
flatten file.tasks as T
where T.text

table filter(file.tasks.text, (t) => t) as "Task Text"
from "Scratchpad"
where file.tasks.text

FLATTEN makes it easier to operate on nested lists since you can then use simpler where conditions on them as opposed to using functions like map() or filter().

LIMIT

Restrict the results to at most N values.

LIMIT 5

Commands are processed in the order they are written, so the following sorts the results after they have already been limited:

LIMIT 5
SORT date ASCENDING