It’s a lot harder than describing the issue. As you’ve discovered just the year is treated as a number, and the combination year-month and year-month-day is treated as dates, and don’t sort nicely together out of the box.
Here is a somewhat extensive examples showing some alternate declarations, and approaches related to this issue:
---
dYear: 2023
dMonth: 2023-03
dDay: 2023-03-03
sYear: "2023"
sMonth: "2023-03"
sDay: "'2023-03-03'"
fsYear: 2023
fsMonth: 2023/03
fsDay: 2023/03/03
preYear: _2023
preMonth: _2023-03
preDay: _2023-03-03
---
value — dYear: `= this.dYear`, dMonth: `= this.dMonth`, dDay: `= this.dDay`
typeof — dYear: `= typeof(this.dYear)`, dMonth: `= typeof(this.dMonth)`, dDay: `= typeof(this.dDay)`
stringified — dYear: `= string(this.dYear)`, dMonth: `= string(this.dMonth)`, dDay: `= string(this.dDay)`
value — sYear: `= this.sYear`, sMonth: `= this.sMonth`, sDay: `= this.sDay`
typeof - sYear: `= typeof(this.sYear)` - sMonth: `= typeof(this.sMonth)` - sDay: `= typeof(this.sDay)`
value — fsYear: `= this.fsYear`, fsMonth: `= this.fsMonth`, fsDay: `= this.fsDay`
typeof — fsYear: `= typeof(this.fsYear)`, fsMonth: `= typeof(this.fsMonth)`, fsDay: `= typeof(this.fsDay)`
value — preYear: `= this.preYear`, preMonth: `= this.preMonth`, preDay: `= this.preDay`
typeof — preYear: `= typeof(this.preYear)`, preMonth: `= typeof(this.preMonth)`, preDay: `= typeof(this.preDay)`
Four groups of the combinations:
- d* – The native, intuitive approach. Returns number, date, date
- s* - Explicit defined as strings. Returns number, date, date
- fs* - Using forward slashes to avoid date interpretation. Returns number, string, string
- pre* - Prefixes with underscore (or any other letter thingy) to avoid numbers and dates. Returns string, string, string
Even specifically casting the first group using string, doesn’t give the raw value, as the month variant, since it’s interpreted as a date will present itself as the first of that month. It’s close to being acceptable in some circumstances though.
So in my experience so far, if you truly want to have those three options of year, year-month and year-month-date, all treated as string, you either need to prefix them with something turning them all into strings _or you need to pick them out of the frontmatter directly. All but the year variant, can still be translated back into strings if need be using either regexreplace() or substring() in combination with date().
Using file.frontmatter gives the raw value
Listed in dataview issue 1403, they talk about possibly adding a rawValue variant to get to the duration directly without it being translated. Furthermore they also talk about lifting the values directly from the _frontmatter, to get to the raw value.
And surely, if your fields are defined in the frontmatter, you can use the following to get to their actual value:
file.frontmatter value — dYear: `= this.file.frontmatter.dYear`, dMonth: `= this.file.frontmatter.dMonth`, dDay: `= this.file.frontmatter.dDay`
file.frontmatter typeof — dYear: `= typeof(this.file.frontmatter.dYear)`, dMonth: `= typeof(this.file.frontmatter.dMonth)`, dDay: `= typeof(this.file.frontmatter.dDay)`
Which will return:
So here we get the combination of number, string, string. In other words, if your fields are defined in the frontmatter, you might use string(file.frontmatter.yourField) to get the raw value as a string.
