Developing Against Dataview

Dataview includes a high-level plugin-facing API as well as TypeScript definitions and a utility library; to install it, simply use:

npm install -D obsidian-dataview

Accessing the Dataview API

You can use the getAPI() function to obtain the Dataview Plugin API; this returns a DataviewApi object which provides various utilities, including rendering dataviews, checking dataview's version, hooking into the dataview event life cycle, and querying dataview metadata.

import { getAPI } from "obsidian-dataview";

const api = getAPI();

For full API definitions available, check index.ts or the plugin API definition plugin-api.ts.

Binding to Dataview Events

You can bind to dataview metadata events, which fire on all file updates and changes, via:

plugin.registerEvent(plugin.app.metadataCache.on("dataview:index-ready", () => {
    ...
});

plugin.registerEvent(plugin.app.metadataCache.on("dataview:metadata-change",
    (type, file, oldPath?) => { ... }));

For all events hooked on MetadataCache, check index.ts.

Value Utilities

You can access various type utilities which let you check the types of objects and compare them via Values:

import { getAPI, Values } from "obsidian-dataview";

const field = getAPI(plugin.app)?.page('sample.md').field;
if (!field) return;

if (Values.isHtml(field)) // do something
else if (Values.isLink(field)) // do something
// ...