Dataview list matching some properties and not others, though they have the same values

[ybanens]

I have a simple dataview query to list all active projects:

dataview
LIST FROM #project 
WHERE status = "active"

or alternatively, since they are also all in a folder called ‘Projects’:

dataview
LIST FROM "Projects"
WHERE status = "active"

But in each case it’s only matching some of the matching pages. All the pages have a property called ‘status’ whose value is ‘active’, yet most are not matching. Can anyone suggest why this might be?

This one doesn’t match…

And this one does.

[solarboi]

If you go into “Source” view, you’ll likely be able to see the difference between the pages that are returning and those that aren’t. I just saw someone else have this issue, and I suspect it’s from Obsidian Properties reformatting a bunch of people’s metadata.

WHERE status = "active" only works if you have metadata that’s a single text property, like so:

---
status: active
---

However, “status” is shown in your screenshots as a “List” type, not a “Text” type, so a lot of your notes likely got reformatted by Properties to be like this:

---
status:
  - active
---

When things are formatted this way, you need to switch to using “contains” to find your stuff:

dataview
LIST FROM #project
WHERE contains(status, active)

You can read more about contains() here, if you want to understand better how it works: Functions - Dataview