Indented tasks not recognized by Dataview

Summary When tasks of the - [ ] taskname variety are indented, Dataview does not display them in queries.

- [ ] Task         //Dataview sees this
	- [ ] Task //Dataview does not see this

This reproduces reliably on my Mac, but not on the mobile app (iOS). Edit: the incorrect behavior now reproduces on Obsidian for iOS as well.

To Reproduce

Create a content document:

#dataviewtest

- Notes
- [ ] Task A (root level)
- [ ] Task B (root level)
- More notes
	- [ ] Task C
- Still more notes
- [ ] Task D

Create a Dataview query:

dv.taskList(dv.pages("#dataviewtest").file
  .tasks
  .where(t => !t.completed), true)

Expected result: Dataview render shows task A, B, C, and D

Actual result: Dataview render shows tasks A, B, and D

Screenshots Issue occurring on desktop:

Earlier this morning, the issue did not occur on mobile (screenshot of the same document as above):

…but a couple hours later I happened to open the same document and the indented tasks are now missing:

Desktop (please complete the following information):

• OS: macOS 11.5.2
• Obsidian Version 0.12.12
• Dataview Version 0.4.5

Smartphone (please complete the following information):

• Device: iPhone XS
• OS: 14.7.1
• Obsidian Version 1.0.4
• Dataview Version 0.4.4 and 0.4.5 (tested on both versions)

[claremacrae]

I can confirm that this is still a problem - I tested it with these versions:

• dataview 0.4.17
• dataview 0.4.20

The crucial part of reproducing the problem is adding a filter on whether the task is complete or not.

1 Markdown source

My markdown source is this, and this is in a folder where these are the only tasks - 5 incomplete tasks:

- [ ] A
    - [ ] A 1
    - [ ] B 1
- B
    - [ ] B 1
    - [ ] B 2

2 Show all tasks

When I ask dataview to show all tasks in this folder - using this query - with backticks changed to apostrophes:

'''dataview
TASK
FROM ""
WHERE file.folder = this.file.folder
SORT file.name
'''

I see this output, which is what I am expecting - all 5 incomplete tasks are shown:

3 Show incomplete tasks

When I filter for only incomplete tasks - using this query, by adding !completed to the WHERE - with backticks changed to apostrophes:

'''dataview
TASK
FROM ""
WHERE file.folder = this.file.folder and !completed
SORT file.name
'''

I see this output, which misses out the incomplete sub-tasks B 1 and B 2 - only the first 3 incomplete tasks are shown:

4 Observations

Note that the only difference between the working and incomplete dataview task lists is the addition of and !completed to the WHERE clause.

In this example, I restricted results to the local folder - but this is unrelated to the bug. Most of my dataview uses look like this - where !completed is the only filter - again with backticks converted to apostrophes:

'''dataview  
TASK  
FROM ""
WHERE !completed  
SORT file.name ASC  
'''

So it seems to me that:

• dataview is able to find the indented tasks B 1 and B 2 because they are included in the output of section 2
• so I strongly suspect the problem must be something to do with the filtering treating parents of indented tasks as “completed” if they do not have any [ ] string, i.e. are not tasks, so that they cannot be complete.

[blacksmithgu]

How blocks underneath the task should render is a matter of preference, so the best option here is probably going to be to add a recursive where statement which lets you filter out undesired sub-nodes. I’ve added it to the next release backlog.