Dataview - Metadata inheritance to Tasks from Page

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1

Hey, folks. I’ve a question about metadata inheritance specifically as it applies to tasks inheriting metadata from a page.

I would like to create a table of tasks where the metadata defined on a page is reflected unless the metadata field is overwritten for that specific task.

eg.

With an example page of:

---
month: May
"Cloud Cover": ".35"
tags: may
---

- [x] 1st
- [x] 2nd
- [x] 3rd [cloudCover: .80]
- [x] 4th [cloudCover: 1]
...
- [ ] 30th
- [ ] 31st

I would expect to be able to use this query

Table without id
    sDay.text as Day,
	sDay.cloudCover as "Cloud Cover"
FROM #may 
FLATTEN this.file.tasks as sDay

to get

Day (6) Cloud Cover
1st .35
2nd .35
3rd cloudCover.80 .80
4th cloudCover1 1
30th .35
31st .35

Where all but the cloudCover value defined on the 3rd and 4th is inherited from the page’s metadata.

Instead, I get

Day6 Cloud Cover
1st -
2nd -
3rd cloudCover.80 .80
4th cloudCover1 1
30th -
31st -

What am I missing about list items or tasks inheriting from pages?

2

Even simpler, using an inline:

= this.file.tasks.cloudCover returns

-,-,.80,1,-,-

when if inheritance worked as the documentation implies it does, it should return

.35,.35,.80,1,.35,35

3

There are some minor issues, which I’ll come back to, but the main thing you missed out on is to use of the default() function. This allows you to pick a value, and if that’s not defined use the alternate parameter.

In addition, you’ve got some strangeness with using this.file.tasks in the FLATTEN command instead of just file.tasks which will make a major difference when doing the query on all files tagged #may.

In general, from my limited experience, I would advice against using spaces in the field names, as it tends to cause issues. I almost always either use CamelCase or lowercase_with_underscores. (Please don’t use lowercase-with-dashes, as that’ll break in some cases where the - is treated as the actual minus sign and a calculation is attempted to be done)

With that being said, one can (often) reach field names with spaces using the something["Cover Cloud"] instead of the obviously faulty something.Cover Cloud. And in this case, that something needs to be row. Just as a proof of concept, try the following query to show some different ways to address a field name with space in it:

```dataview
TABLE WITHOUT ID
  cloud-cover,
  row["Cloud Cover"],
  row.cloud-cover,
  row["cloud-cover"],
  row["Cloud Cover"],
  file.frontmatter["Cloud Cover"]
WHERE file.name = this.file.name
```

Ok, back to the real task at hand, here is a modified script with some smaller adjustments:

```dataview
TABLE WITHOUT ID
  sDay.text as Day,
  cCover as "Cloud Cover"
FROM #may 
FLATTEN file.tasks as sDay
FLATTEN default(sDay.cloudCover, row["Cloud Cover"]) as cCover
```

Which produces this output from the first four elements in your example:

image
image805×221 5.61 KB

As can be seen from the last line, it’ll use the sDay.cloudCover field, but if that don’t hold a value, it’ll pick the second option, row["Cloud Cover"]. In any case this value is stored in cCover which is now available for sorting and grouping and where clauses, and so on.

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