Dataview: TASK query that is not task

Help
1

Hi all,

What I’m trying to do

I’m trying to create a list of bullet items / bullet points from my entire vault that has specific metadata. I’ve been using the TASK query up until now for tasks and it’s been working very well and I saw that there is a boolean property called task which I’d hoped would do what I’m wanting to achieve

Things I have tried

```dataview
TASK
WHERE !task
WHERE type = "idea"
```

```dataview
TASK
WHERE task = False
WHERE type = "idea"
```

What has worked is this LIST query:

```dataview
LIST WITHOUT ID
L.text
FLATTEN file.lists AS L
WHERE L.type = "idea"
```
2

Your third one, with file.lists, is the way to do it.

Dataview doesn’t have an indirect path to the list items via “query all tasks that aren’t tasks”; the result would be nothing.

You might already know this and were just showing a simplified example, but in case you didn’t know: Flattening all file.lists on a medium-sized vault might very well crash Obsidian or could at the least bring your CPU fan to life while you wait for the result.

You can make your last query structurally more efficient by using a filter in the FLATTEN:

```dataview
LIST WITHOUT ID text
FLATTEN filter(file.lists, (l) => l.type = "idea").text AS text
```

And if possible, adding a WHERE before the FLATTEN could also reduce processing by limiting which notes’ lists Dataview has to look through.

3

Thanks!