Super basic dataview question: how to list all files with my field in them?

[wealthychef]

Things I have tried

I have the following YAML/frontmatter in my file:

---
Aliases: [ ]
tags: meetings-conversations 
meeting: 
 mtype: book-club
people: [ thomas ]
---

I created the following query:

list from #meetings-conversations 
where file.meeting.mtype =book-club

As expected, this listed the current file. I thought, great. But then I noticed, it listed two other non-book-club files too, so I tested my syntax like this:

list from #meetings-conversations 
where file.meeting.mtype = NOT-book-club

To my surprise, the current file showed up in this list too, even though I’m asking for “NOT-book-club” which should not match with book-club.

If I use “book-club” in quotes like this:

list from #meetings-conversations 
where meeting[mtype] = "book-club"

Then I get zero results. Huh.
I’ve tried dots, brackets, quotes, no quotes, all to no avail. Huh.

I have updated dataview plugin and am using Obsidian 0.15.4
Pretty sure I’m just not understanding a basic Thing.

What I’m trying to do

I wish to understand the proper query syntax to list all the files with the book-club value for the meeting type.
I want to understand how to nest fields, such as here with the type field nested inside the meeting field.
Can someone help me list all the files with file.meeting.mtype = “book-club” ? Thanks!

[Craig]

Hi @wealthychef, you were close!

Try this:

```dataview
LIST
FROM #meetings-conversations 
WHERE meeting.mtype = "book-club"
```

Here’s a working example:

[wealthychef]

I think this should be in the documentation somewhere. They do not show how to use nested values. I’ll make it an issue on github. Thank you so much! I literally tried every combination it seems but the right one! Ha. story of my programming life with Obsidian… cheers

[scholarInTraining]

@wealthychef As well as Craig’s answer, the following version of the WHERE line also works for me:

WHERE meeting["mtype"] = "book-club"

Dataview does something fancy to support accessing nested fields with both the dot notation and the quoted indexing notation. The quotes are necessary if indexing.

[wealthychef]

Thanks for adding that, especially the clarification about quoting. I’d like to know more about the notation’s origins and meaning, but knowing how to use it is almost as good.

[wealthychef]

I know this is solved, but I have another question closely related, which is, why does leaving the quotes off match all files that have a meeting.mtype field at all? It feels like the lack of quotes is coercing the value of book-club to True and then coercing the string values to a boolean because of the query type. Am I making sense? I just like to know why why why

[scholarInTraining]

Agreed. In lieu of a better conceptual understanding, I did a little more experimentation.
Here is my YAML (I used key names that did not occur anywhere else in my vault so that I did not have to worry about using FROM to filter.)

---
mainKey:
  keyIWant1: val1
  keyIWant2: val2
---

Then I just made a giant table with different variations. Perhaps you have some more of your own to experiment with!

TABLE WITHOUT ID
mainKey,
mainKey.keyIWant1 AS "withDot",
mainKey["keyIWant1"] AS "withIndex",
mainKey.keyIWant1 = "val1" AS "equals 'val1'",
mainKey.keyIWant1 = val1 AS "equals val1",
keyIWant1 AS "subkey alone",
keyIWant1 = "val1" AS "subkey equals 'val1'?",
keyIWant1 = val1 AS "subkey equals val1?"

Results (reformatted to markdown):

mainKey	withDot	withIndex	equals ‘val1’	equals val1	subkey alone	subkey equals ‘val1’?	subkey equals val1?
keyIWant1: val1 keyIWant2: val2	val1	val1	true	false	–	false	true

Without quotes, val1 (or book-club) is treated as the name of a variable, which if it does not exist as a field name in your file will be some “falsey” (opposite of “truthy”, both apparently technical terms!) value like null or undefined. Not sure which in regular dataview. In the rightmost 3 rows of the table, I tried to access keyIWant1 directly, which does not work. So I get a blank when trying to display its value and internally it is “falsey” (null or undefined). That does not equal “val1”, clearly. But in the rightmost column I am asking if two “falsey” things are equal, and they are!

A correctly formatted field name like mainKey.keyIWant1 or mainKey["keyIWant1"] that has a value in your file will compare its value as you would expect. So in the middle of the table, “val1” = “val1” is true and “val1” = <something falsey> is false.

Does that make sense?

[wealthychef]

Yes, that’s a nice explanation and a nice procedure for testing syntax.