Formatting issues with output of list query

[davidmickelsen]

I have various movie notes for different movies, and I want to use the date-watched field to display a list of the dates on which I've watched that movie, each date displaying on its own line in the body of the note. Since inline Dataview fields only allow comma-separated lists, I've added the date-watched field to my frontmatter, and put a Dataview list query in the body of the note to display the dates as a list. So the frontmatter content would look like this:

date-watched:
- 2023-04-01 20:01
- 2023-04-29 22:33

and the query looks like this:

list without id date-watched
where file = this.file

which gives me the following output:

(edit view)
(read view)

This is what I'm looking for, except for two formatting issues:

1. An extra bullet to the left of the bulleted list of dates (and a vertical line in read view)
I imagine this is not a bug, but rather the expected behavior, as it considers the outputted dates as one list item; but for this use case, that leftmost bullet is superfluous. Is there any way to avoid this?

2. I'd like to adjust the date format
I input the dates as YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm because I want the hour and minute information to be available for things like listing my most recently viewed movies and shows; but I don't want to see it in this query. I'd prefer the output to look like:

- April 1, 2023
- April 29, 2023

I've tried using the dateformat function, but I haven't figured out how to get it to work in this case. Forgive me if I'm missing something obvious here.

Thanks very much for any insight the community can provide, and thanks to the developers for the fantastic plugin.

[AB1908]

1. date-watched is an array. Flatten it.
2. dateformat() is the correct idea but your string is not being parsed as a date in the first place. Try casting it with date() first.

[davidmickelsen]

Thanks very much for your reply, @AB1908. Flattening date-watched worked perfectly to fix the first issue. However, I'm still doing something wrong with dateformat(), because when I rewrite the query as:

list without id dateformat(date(date-watched), "MMMM d, yyyy")
flatten date-watched
where file = this.file

I get the following result:

[AB1908]

I guess the casting isn't working properly. Let me test this when I have the time. The main idea is that we need to extract the date string first and then cast that I think. Maybe it gets confused because of the timestamp.

[davidmickelsen]

Understood. Thanks for your help on this.

[davidmickelsen]

Hi @AB1908, a quick update on this: in doing a bit of investigating, I realized that when I remove the times from the dates in my frontmatter (to read as 2023-04-01 and 2023-04-29, rather than 2023-04-01 20:01 and 2023-04-29 22:33), the query from my previous post outputs the desired result:

list without id dateformat(date(date-watched), "MMMM d, yyyy")
flatten date-watched
where file = this.file

now renders:

It seems that Dataview is not recognizing that YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm contains a date, but it is recognizing YYYY-MM-DD. Am I correct on this? Is there any way to get around the issue?

By the way, after changing the dates in the frontmatter, the query works even without casting with date():

list without id dateformat(date-watched, "MMMM d, yyyy")
flatten date-watched
where file = this.file

gives the same desired output as well.