How To Use Obsidian: Properties, DataView, & ONE HUGE PROBLEM TO AVOID

I spent a good amount of time last night adding "Front Matter Properties" to my page, I got to the point where I added "scene" as a property and then I added two values "outdoors" and "indoors" for one of my test pages.

My DataView query was: where scene = ["indoors"] or scene = ["outdoors"]

I noticed if the Scene has only ONE property assigned, the DataView works, but if I have BOTH properties assigned, the query doesn't show anything??

I even tried the same using the tags property - no joy?!

I was up late researching the query language etc., when I ran across something that said (paraphrasing) "having MULTIPLE values doesn't currently work"

This is a deal breaker for me if I can't figure out how to have a Dataview return results when there are multiple values in a property??!

Is there perhaps a "List Query" that I need to learn / use since I'm looking to test for multiple values (List), in a property?? A plugin?, a way to code this myself?

Any thoughts appreciated!

As someone who is just starting to use Obsidian, this video is PRICELESS!

I have a HUGE (with a 'B') movie and photo collection and I'm attempting to use Obsidian (especially being able to link to files on my computer!), as a means to catalog my zillions (again w\a 'B') of files.

I'm also using the Media Extended Community plugin which allows me to create time-stamped notes and take screenshots from the media player while playing through the videos- NICE! 👍

THANKS so much for teaching the use of Properties and the Dataview - PROPS!

Edit - AND you saved me from having to remove zillions of spaces from within my property names once I start using the Dataview! 👍💯

I have been using Obsidian for about a year and a half and have also ignored YAML due to formating and not liking it sitting at the top of my notes. Ended up laying out properties the same way as you did. Now Obisidian have improved how properties are displayed I may start changing how I enter meta data moving forward.

my man, this is an awesome explanation of properties and how to use them. I know Obsidian pretty well, but overthink it so much. Your videos are refreshing and inspiring. Your pacing is great, and your tone is super friendly. Looking forward to watching more!

i hope someone told you already to a) read the error message at least once b) you have to use "-" for the space " " in the attribute and no matter your case, they are all lowercase written in the view. you must be terrible at googling, no insult.

Thanks for this. Your videos are great. Very helpful :)

thanks man, you made this easy to understand. I am glad you saved me time on the 'space' problem.

Dude, you don't have to rename your fields if they have spaces -> use "release-date"... rtfd

black-and-white should be a toggle like Yes/No rather than a tag. It only has two states.

couldn't you use quotations for values that contain a space? Does anyone know if that works?

In order to change Release Date in all files in your vault or only under your Movies folder, you can use a program called Notepad ++. It is a Open Source text editor than can replace text strings in all the files in a folder for example

Never understood what Properties so never used them until I watched this video, i'm I''ll be using them now with an extra spice with the Dataview plug-in/.

Technically, all that was done is make frontmatter look "nicer"

The issue you had with the tag being split is one of the reasons I won't switch to properties. I have a better handle of what's going on if I can see what the actual values are (not something I've clicked)

1) Is there a way to copy the result of a Dataview query from obsidian and paste it into Notepad/MS Word/Excel etc. Any plugin which can help us in doing this?

2) If i have text in obsidian with formatting like [[ ]], bold etc.., how can i copy the text without formatting/[[]] and paste it into notepad/MS Word as plain text?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Jonathan, thank you for this very approachable video for the curious but average person! Very helpful!

I'm unsure if these comments covered this, but "Release Date" can be a valid property name. If you want to use that property in Dataview, you can use "lower kebab case" in your query. In this case, you would use "release-date." All lowercase with spaces replaced with a dash.

Thank you for your great in depth review for this particular, important subject! Handling database in Obsidian! Thanks a lot!

I've watched a lot of videos on DataView and this is the first one I actually understand. Thank you.

I had a problem with dates. Some of them I knew the whole date, some only the year and month, and some only the year.
In the end I opted for "Text" and using the "YYYY-MM-DD" format which worked even when I only had "YYYY".
Since 1999 is before 1999-12-01 in alphabetical order!

Thank you very much for your sharing, since Obsidian updated to version 1.4, my DataView lookup syntax is not working, I tried to find the solution through Google, but I didn't find it, which wasted me a lot of time!😭 Through your sharing I have now successfully displayed my DataView table, thanks again!❤

why google Datview code
why NOT chatGpt?

Useful video. I'm new to Obsidian but well versed as a dev. It's been very helpful to get practical insights into how it's used in a real world scenario that's not academically oriented. I'm looking forward to watching more of your videos. Thanks for taking the time to share all of this knowledge!

Useless video. The YAML standard does not imply spaces in properties. Just read a d*mn instructions.

dataview is so usefull i wonder why dont they implement that function natievly like they did with properties

Thanks, A new subscriber now🎉🎉🎉

Thanks for exposing your mistakes! Helpful to see vulnerabilities and how you worked around them. I wonder if the HTML trick for "spaces" might also work? Because that markup language doesn't parse spaces correctly either, you can use "&nbsp" (the crazy letter codes between the quotes) to tell the language that you need a space. So maybe you can keep your "Release Date" property with the space (no quotes), but in the dataview, maybe you can try "&nbsp" (again, no quotes) to call an item with a space. Dunno...worth a try. And since I'm super novice and only setting up my first vault, I'll have to try this when I get around to dataview later!

I didn't know Obsidian was this capable. I was thinking it was just a way of automagically linking notes together. I think you've struck gold! Now I'm going to have to take a much deeper look at using Obsidian. I had almost "written it off" as just another notes keeping program with hyperlinks. Now I'm beginning to understand that Obsidian may be something really special. Thanks for making this video, and please don't call yourself an "Idiot". You just hadn't learned all the details of creating a query. Now we've both learned something new. Probably more folks, too....

how can I set it up that properties automatically is added to every note and then ideally, even populated with creation time and last updated?

You can just wrap "Release Date" in quotes in the dataview