Obsidian/Plugin/Dataview

• obsidian-dataview

  • Obsidian community plugin that treats the vault as a database and queries it from fenced code blocks. Metadata comes from YAML frontmatter and from inline fields written in the body of a note.
  • Stars: 9,327 · License: MIT · last pushed November 2025, so it is quiet compared with Obsidian/Plugin/obsidian-tasks.
  • Docs: Dataview documentation

  • Inline fields

    • Anywhere in a note's body, key:: value names a field on the surrounding block. Wrapped in square brackets or parentheses, [key:: value] puts the field mid-sentence and hides the key from Obsidian's rendered view.
    • On a checkbox line this is how a todo picks up fields without emoji: - [ ] Renew the domain [due:: 2026-09-30] [priority:: high].
    • The double colon is the whole mechanism, which is why the syntax reads plainly in nvim and survives any Markdown tool that does not know about it — a reader sees the brackets and the words.

  • Queries

    • A fenced dataview block holds a query in Dataview Query Language: TABLE, LIST, TASK and CALENDAR over FROM a folder or tag, with WHERE, SORT and GROUP BY.
    • TASK queries are the ones aimed at todos: they collect checkbox lines across the vault and render them as an interactive list whose checkboxes write back to the source file.
    • dataviewjs blocks run JavaScript against the same index.

    • TASK
      FROM "Journals"
      WHERE !completed AND due <= date(today) + dur(7 days)
      SORT priority DESC, due ASC
      

  • Where it stops

    • Every query is evaluated by the plugin's own engine inside Obsidian. A static site generator reading the same files sees a code block and nothing else — QuartzMD/Q/Which Obsidian technique for rich todos renders on a QuartzMD site? works through what that costs and what recovers it, and Obsidian/Explanation/What a Base Is explains why Obsidian/Feature/Bases keeps its fields somewhere a site build can reach them.
    • Obsidian/Plugin/obsidian-tasks reads and writes Dataview's bracketed fields as an alternative to its own emoji, so the two conventions can share one vault.

  • Sources

    • Dataview — Adding metadata
    • Dataview — Query types