Nested Inline Fields

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. Frontmatter data can be arbitrarily nested however as far as I understand it your inline field system is limited to just top level keys and values.

Describe the solution you’d like It would be nice if there was a way to describe arbitrarily nested data through the inline fields as well. This may be incompatible with the current implementation so I understand if you mark this as won’t-fix

For example I would like to collect all date ranges under the date key for easy accessing. In YAML I would do something like this.

---
date:
  construction: 2000
  life: 2000-2020
  demolition: 2020
---

Could be defined inline as

(date:: construction:: 2000)
(date:: life:: 2000-2020)
(date:: demolition:: 2020)

And rendered like this

Additional Context There are some compatibility issues that I don’t have answers to eg what would the following look like in data form

(date:: 2000)
(date:: life:: 2000-2020)

or this

(date:: 2000)
(date:: 2020)
(date:: life:: 2000-2020)

[gentlegiantJGC]

I have opened a pull request to fix the html corruption.

I have had some more thoughts on how the data should be structured when parsed.

Examples

Here are some examples of how the plugin currently parses data (I believe)

Example 1

[key:: value]

becomes

{"key": "value"}

Example 2

[key1:: value1]
[key1:: value2]

becomes

{"key1": ["value1", "value2"]}

Example 3

[key1:: value1]
[key1:: [key2:: value2]]

becomes

{"key1": ["value1", "[key2:: value2]"]}

Example 4

[key1:: value1]
[key1:: [key2:: value2]]
[key1:: [key2:: value3]]

becomes

{"key1": ["value1", "[key2:: value2]", "[key2:: value3]"]}

The two options going forward as far as I see them are either

1. Dataview plugin has no special handling and continues to treat them as strings and leaves it up to the user to handle them
2. Dataview plugin looks for nested fields and parses those as well. Examples 3 and 4 would look like the following.

{"key1": ["value1", {"key2": "value2"}]}

{"key1": ["value1", {"key2": "value2"}, {"key2": "value3"}]}

I don’t think it would be wise for the dataview plugin to try and merge the data more than this due to the ambiguity of how to merge dictionaries as well as the possibility of the list containing strings.

[gentlegiantJGC]

I have solved this particular issue in a different way outside of the dataview plugin. I thought I would just thought I would open the discussion.