No Results Shown - there should be results shown?

[boberta]

What I’m trying to do

Context- this vault is for my writing.
I am attempting to compile lists of characters, I want to have 4 lists, 1 for Mages, 1 for Humans, 1 for Seers, 1 for Sleepers.

I was able to pull a list of deceased characters by making a DV list where the death field was filled in (not with anything specific, just not empty) so I have at least 1 working list from the Population folder (Vault/Population, so it’s a parent folder)
That looked like:

LIST rows.file.link
FROM "Population"
WHERE death
SORT file.name ASC

Back to the problem, when I make my lists for the other 4, they look something like this:

LIST rows.file.link
FROM "Population"
WHERE ability="Sleepwalking"
SORT file.name ASC

It returns no error, it simply creates a box that says “Dataview: No results to show for list query.”

The thing is, there’s definitely characters where the ability property (list type) has Sleepwalking as the property listed? I’m unsure why it is returning nothing. That seems to be the common denominator as well, as all of these are from list properties where I just want to make a list where everyone with 1 of those list options appears.

Things I have tried

I’ve been searching in and out of the dataview github, example vault, here & reddit; I’ve tried relaunching obsidian, making sure i am fully updated on obsidian&dv.
I remade my dataview querys with the basic dataview query builder website in case I made them wrong, and that still returns no results.
frankly, I am very new to dv in general, I am not sure what I’m doing wrong and if I am even searching up the right things to help me find an old thread on this

[Pch]

@boberta

the ability property (list type)

You could try to use contains() in that case (I mean, for a list type of key), instead of equal

// ...
WHERE contains(ability, "Sleepwalking")
// ...

[boberta]

This worked like a charm!
I have a follow up question if you happen to know a follow up answer, though!

So my list appears as

• [[Person]]: -

How can I make it appear just as

• [[Person]]

(if that makes sense)?

[Pch]

I think you can remove the rows.file.link on the 1st line …

LIST
FROM "Population"
WHERE contains(ability, "Sleepwalking")
SORT file.name ASC