DataView queries for newbies with AI help (for free)

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DataView queries for newbies (like myself) with AI help (for free)


Our regular forum poster @holroy handles user questions in the Help section but for easy everyday tasks users are encouraged to take their own initiative.

Enter AI help.
@johnmavrick created a plugin called Intelligence that makes use of Open AI assistants that can be put to use in Chat-GPT conversations.
Using those assistants is not free. They’re not expensive but some people may not even have debit or credit cards…

He created 4 files that can be used for prompts or context – we will use those in the Copilot plugin with the free Google AI Studio’s Gemini Pro API that can be acquired and used for non-supported countries as well if one uses a VPN.

  • Read the linked post as well with my comment about VPN and what to use, again, for free.

In Copilot settings, you add your newly acquired API from Google Gemini and might want to turn up the Token limit so you won’t be hindered.

Then in the Copilot sidebar press the “Send Note(s)” button. → ‘No active note found.’
Yes, you need to be on the note you want to upload.
These are in the order:
Dataview Assistant Prompt.md (3.7 KB)
Dataview Data Commands.md (2.8 KB)
Dataview Expressions.md (1.6 KB)
Dataview Functions.md (21.9 KB)

Save these files in your vault under a folder you will easily find them. Make these notes active by opening them and one by one press the ‘Send Note(s)’ button now (you need to feed all four to the robot). The bot (which is now working on Gemini Pro, right) will acknowledge reading the files.

Finally, pose your question to what query you want to make.

Couple of tips:

  • If you specify the full vault to be queried, it might give you FROM "vault", which is incorrect; FROM "" is correct for full vault.
  • If your vault is too large, try to limit results for a smaller folder first to see that the robot got the requirements right in the first place.
  • If the robot didn’t get it right the first time, don’t give up.

Credits go to people named and linked above for the ideas and the actual implementation.

EDIT. (Hopefully) Fixed fourth file not being able to be sent.

There is also S-Blu’s online Query Builder that many people by now know about:
https://s-blu.github.io/basic-dataview-query-builder/

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In general I’m happy to help with query questions, but there is one area where I’m increasingly reluctant to help, and that is with AI based garbage queries. So why someone would like to pay to get those garbage queries is beyond my understanding.

Your time and money is much better spent on reading either forums posts, or tutorials, or videos on Dataview queries. Even just reading through and trying to understand the first three files, which I suspect is lifted from the dataview documentation site, would be better.

So I strongly agree with users taking initiative and trying to figure out stuff, but I even stronger advice against use the AI to produce queries or coding in general.

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That’s what translators say as well – that the human factor cannot be spared…so I detect a trace of professional jealousy there – which, I agree is by and large well-grounded.

I also know that people are generally lazy and won’t look into said documentation because it’s just – foreign.

I also know that these things need to be fiddled around with, so for example in Copilot settings, we can turn up Temperature to make the robot be more creative or turn it down to straighten it out a bit.

It needs some playing around with and for more elaborate stuff, they’ll have you. :slight_smile:

And all of the above is by the way, free of charge.

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I…He said that it was free. All AI things have free tiers. We’re not paying. The AI is pulling from the same sources that you suggested. All of my queries are AI produced. They all work perfectly. My only shortfall is not knowing when to use Javascript or when to use plugin specific syntax.