Many of my notes and templates have something like this in the frontmatter:
Pages:
Total: 427
Read: 65
I’ve been using this information to calculate reading progress. But right now with the new properties, the Property Type has a file icon with question mark, and the value field is something like {"Total:427, “Read”:65}. Dataview table still recognizes this so it’s no problem, but I can’t change that value at all. This also only appears in the older files. I can’t have something like this in the new note, it’s just won’t show up in dataview table. Is there a work around for this issue?
Until the properties UI is changed to address this, you can still access and edit your original nested YAML fields in source mode, which displays the raw text contents of the note.
To toggle back and forth between source mode, you can select the “Toggle Live Preview/Source mode” in the command palette.
Alternatively, in Settings → Editor → Properties in document, you can select the “Source” option to turn off the properties UI and view your YAML frontmatter as text.
I hope you are right, but I have to ask what makes you so confident that it will be changed. The documentation seems pretty clear that nested properties are simply not supported, and I haven’t seen anything to contradict that.
(I’m contemplating having to modify the frontmatter of all my notes, but want to be sure before I do.)
I don’t really know what they’ll do one way or another. I meant something more like “up until such a time as when the properties UI is potentially changed to address this…”
However there does seem to be a lot of community energy and support for properties to handle nested YAML keys and the dev team historically has seemed responsive to things like this (as far as I can tell, in my limited estimation), so I guess I do feel optimistic that it’s something they’ll address sooner or later. Though of course I don’t really know one way or another and my feeling shouldn’t be taken as diagnostic of anything.
re: modifying frontmatter, it’s also possible to just turn off the properties UI altogether and have the frontmatter be displayed the way it used to, and dataview apparently still work with nested frontmatter keys, so it doesn’t seem like you’re forced into changing your system too drastically even if they never update the UI (assuming dataview continues to support nested frontmatter keys, which I don’t see why they’d go out of their way to remove that support).