Why does this Dataview query work

[RoyRogers]

I have a Dataview query that I composed purely by trial and error, which works very well to recap reading log notes across documents. But I have no idea why it works.

Here’s what the data in a note looks like – I add multiple reading sessions to the same note; different books; different durations; different sections:

In my recap note, I have this query

TABLE without ID file.link as "File", Book, Time, Section
WHERE Book

The query produces this table, which is exactly what I want

But – I have no idea why that works. This is an if-it’s-not-broken-don’t-fix-it case, but for my own edification I’d really like to know why.

[Chompas]

Hi! I’m on the same situation as you. I have a weekly note (instead of daily) that I use for personal and work notes but also with the intention of tracking personal activities such as workouts for example.

In my weekly note I had:

activity:: Swim
activity-duration:: 60 minutes

activity:: Run
activity-duration:: 40 minutes

activity:: Swim
activity-duration:: 30 minutes

Which makes it appear in a simple query:

But I’m pretty sure this is a bug because when I try to group by activity and sum the duration I start to get empty results.

I would love to be able to have a feature like this since I’ve been eternally looking for a platform that would allow me to manualy track things quickly and then visualize it.