Learn the Basics

This page shall guide you if you are a newcomer to the power of Dataview. Before you start out, make sure you made yourself familiar with the official Documentation. While the documentation is not the most intuitive guide, it's important to get a grasp of the general idea and functionality to enable you writing your own queries.

There is some further reading you can dive into, but that's not necessary to get started. If you stumble across something, maybe the FAQ can help out.

Understanding meta data on notes

Before you can start querying data from your vault, you need meta data to query. While there is already some information available on your notes and tasks, to leverage the full power of dataview, you'll need to add your own meta data via the frontmatter or inline fields.

Learn more about YAML Frontmatter on the official documentation of Obsidian and take a look on our Frontmatter Overview and how Multivalue YAML Frontmatter Fields work.

Learn more about Inline fields in the dataview documentation .

Basic Structure of Queries

A dataview query consists of following parts - in following order:

• exactly one Query Type
• depending on Query Type, zero, one or many additional properties for displaying
• zero or one FROM data command
• zero to many other data commands.

For more info about the general structure, refer to the documentation.

Understanding Query Types

The type of a query determines the format of your final output. We put together some basic examples you can play around with:

• Basic List Queries
• Basic Table Queries
• Basic Task Queries
• Basic Calendar Queries

Understanding Data Commands

Beside the four types of a query, you can use data commands to filter and enhance your query. There are some specialties to be aware of to successfully use them.

• FROM determines which notes to initially collect for your query depending on given sources
• WHERE lets you filter notes based on information inside notes, i.e. meta data.
• GROUP BY lets you bundle up notes as one "result row" depending on a property (or calculation). See Example GROUP BY Queries for example usages.
• FLATTEN does the opposite of GROUP BY - instead of bundling up, it splits notes depending on a property (or calculation). See Example FLATTEN Queries for example usages.
• SORT sorts your result data depending on a property and a direction.
• LIMIT lets you crop your result data to a desired (maximum) number.

Understanding Inline Queries

Inline Queries are a special form of query. We'll showcase the basics in Basic Inline Queries.

Understanding JavaScript Queries

... would go way beyond the scope of this project 😉. JavaScript Queries are an advanced technique, enabling you to create basically anything if you have dataview, time and knowledge. JavaScript is a full-fledged programming language and learning it takes a huge commitment.

Don't fret, though! The native dataview implementation is already immensely powerful and let you do a ton of complex querying right out of the box. You certainly do not need JavaScript to get started and you're probably fine for the rest of your journey without opening this pandora's box.

If you really wish to get into dataviewjs, hop over to your favorite search engine, search for one of the various free basic courses in JavaScript, learn the basics, read the dataviewjs documentation and get a glimpse of a world full of anarchy.