DATAVIEW alternatives in nvim

[Dardanos-Aeolus]

Hi everybody,

Lots of people use DATAVIEW as a plugin in Obsidian.
I haven't found some similar for Neovim.

So I wanted to start a discussion and give a starting point for people, who are inexperienced like me :-)
(I know this is somewhat hacky - please improve and comment if you can )

1. A simple customised telescope prompt

A telescope prompt could be an alternative for very simple Dataview usage.

So for example I want to have a list of all my notes with active projects.
These have a frontmatter with:

---
type: project
status: open
---

in init.lua:

projekt_liste_picker = function()
	require("telescope.builtin").live_grep({
	cwd="/path/to/your/vault", 
        -- this is the regex search with two keywords
	default_text="type: project.*status: open",
	-- I like normal mode, so I can go up/down with j/k quickly
        initial_mode = "normal",
	vimgrep_arguments={
		"rg",
        	"--color=never",
		"-l",     -- list matching file only fonce
                -- I don't want templates to show, so I exclude these here:
		"--iglob=!templates",
          	"--no-heading",
		"--multiline",
		"--multiline-dotall",
          	"--with-filename",
          	"--line-number",
         	"--column",
          	"--smart-case",
        }
	})

2. A Python Script

Now this is much better :-D
Same application: I want to have a list with active projects.
Here it is written into a md-file inside my vault adding additional metadata.

Setup of python:

pip install python-frontmatter
pip install PTable

import os
import frontmatter
from prettytable import PrettyTable, ALL, HEADER
outputfile_path = "/path/to/your/vault/Projektlist_dynamic.md"

table = PrettyTable()
table.field_names = ["Projectnumber", "Customer", "Status", "Link"]
table.hrules = HEADER
table.junction_char = '|'
table.align = 'l'

folder = "/path/to/your/vault"

for filename in os.listdir(folder):
    if 'md' in filename:
       filename_path = os.path.join(folder,filename)
       tmp_fm = frontmatter.load(filename_path, encoding='utf-8')
       
       if tmp_fm.get('type', 'No type metadatafield') == 'projekt':
           p_status = tmp_fm.get('status', 'ERROR55')
           if p_status == 'open' or p_status == 'hold':
               table.add_row([tmp_fm.get('project', '/'), tmp_fm.get('customer', 'N/A'), tmp_fm.get('status', '/'), r'[[' + filename + r']]'])


output = table.get_string()
with open(outputfile_path, "w", encoding='utf-8') as f:
    f.write("# Projectlist\n")
    f.write("*This File is genereated automatically -- all edits will be lost*\n\n")
    f.write(output)

OUTPUT:

# Projectlist
*This File is genereated automatically -- all edits will be lost*

| Projectnumber  | Customer        | Status | Link                                     |
|----------------|-----------------|--------|------------------------------------------|
| PR4500090      | Random customer | open   | [[20230921-15-13 Random_cu.md]]          |
| PR4500095 / 96 | Customer 1      | open   | [[20240816-15-57-customer1.md]]          |
| digital_Market | Internal        | hold   | [[20240830-10-23-landing-dig-market.md]] |
| PR4500120      | Forever Young   | open   | [[20240906-16-05-forever_young.md]]      |
| Must have      | Personal        | open   | [[20240911-16-09-must_have_urgent.md]]   |

For easier acces I have in my init.lua:
of course you could do the same with autocmd

vim.api.nvim_create_user_command("UpdateProjectList", "!python /path/to/python_script.py", {})
vim.api.nvim_set_keymap('n', "<leader>p", '<cmd>e /path/to/your/vault/Projektlist_dynamic.md<cr>', {silent = true})
vim.api.nvim_set_keymap('n', "<leader>U", '<cmd>UpdateProjectList<cr>', {silent = true})

3. Further ideas:

1. If you want to do more complicated queries, you could load the frontmatter dictionary into a pandas dataFrame
   (Look into pandas.DataFrame.from_dict)
2. The above only looks into the yaml-frontmatter, But Dataview also looks for key:: value pairs in the body.
   Obviously #tags are not taken into consideration, but Dataview looks for them, too.
3. Bonus: Python's PTable can also sort data.

[jkmacc]

I like that this approach is understandable and easy for most folks to extend. The closest I've found to dataview in Neovim is dynomark and it's plugin, but it's written in Go and I'm not familiar with that language. I agree that a dataview alternative is sorely needed!

[psxvoid]

I agree that a dataview alternative is sorely needed!

Or a runtime emulation layer and plugin system that can install official plugins.

[Dardanos-Aeolus]

Oh, nice.
I didn't know about dynomark, but it looks awesome!
It seems pretty powerful.
However, from what I see on the project page, it looks that Windows is not supported, yet.