At the moment bases can only list notes that follow certain criteria. To be a complete replacement for Dataview it would be nice to also be able to create a Base on “Tasks” as a base element. It would use tags, created date, due date and other properties widely supposed by both Obsidian Tasks plugin and Dataview tasks queries for filtering, plus eventual additional properties referring to the note the tasks is in.
Base would enable something possible in Dataview but missing in tasks plugin : having (and sorting on) calculated fields, and displaying the value of those fields (like custom urgency, elapsed time, completion %…).
They are also perfpect candidates for different views like Kanban or Calendar view.
Please make Task usable as a base object for Bases, in addition of Notes.
That usecase is linked to a Base made of Notes : the quoted usecase allows to enrich the Note column with information related or calculated from Tasks embedded into the row-Note.
My usecase has Tasks as the main element, it addresses all Tasks in the entire vault, the properties of those tasks. Each row is a Task, and optionally there is a Task.note property if some data of the parent note is to be calculated.
The quoted usecase just asks for more fields available on the Note object, in a Note Base. My feature request is about a Task Base. The formulas in the .base file would be task.xxx instead of file.xxx.
I have moved my tasks to YAML so that they can be read by Bases, with each task being its own note. Super fast and configurable, and easy to embed where needed. And it saves Bases having to read the entire contents of notes, which as we have seen with the likes of Dataview only serves to slow vaults down. Unless there is a fabulously efficient way of reading old-style tasks, I hope the developers don’t change the code that works so well. If users want to use old-style tasks, existing plugins (and perhaps new plugins) already serve those needs.
No need to write anything up, but is there a how-to guide (simple is fine) or similar about this (here, Discord, etc.) we can link folks to? Thanks if there’s anything!
I’ve seen more and more requests and questions assuming Bases can read the contents of notes and be used like search to query/filter anything, which is just not the case.
Currently, there’s no way to access task-related information directly in bases. For example, I would like to see how many tasks are in a note, how many are completed, how many are still open, etc.
This would allow me, for instance, to add a column in a project list in bases that shows whether there’s an unfinished task with the tag “next action.” That way, I can immediately spot projects where the next step is not yet defined.
Proposed solution
Add a new property file.tasks that returns a list of strings representing the checkboxes found in the note.
Current workaround (optional)
There is currently no workaround to display task-related information in Bases.
Thanks for the reply! Hmm, I was actually led to this idea because I saw that file.embeds was added in version 1.9.4. I assumed that since it’s possible to retrieve embeds from the file content, it might be possible to get tasks in a similar way.
Unfortunately the cache only stores the task location and that a task exists, but it does not store the task details/text, so for bases, it’s not really useful. The actual task details are in the file contents, which aren’t read by bases.
Personally, I would not need to actually access the content of the task. I just need to know how many checkboxes in the file A and how many of them are checked B so that I can display that in table B/A to know that I even though I marked this file with Complete status, I still have some left-over tasks to be done.
I agree. I would be happy to just have simple numbers for completed and uncompleted tasks. And then we could even use some custom-made formula to visualise progress or something.
The attached vault is a pared-down version of how I am tracking tasks in Bases. I use a more detailed and opinionated template to track travel tasks (flights, trains, etc), and another template to track general tasks. I use different Bases to track tasks in each category.
I am still refining my vault as features are added to Bases, but at its simplest I have just moved task data to Properties, where it is easily tracked and added to in Bases. For my needs, it works far better than Dataview, especially as it is so fast in terms of the views updating or adding new tasks via the Base itself.