How to opt out from Dataview interpreting and rendeing time-like text in a special way?

[nkoder]

I have such field in a frontmatter:

drawing_time: "2.5h"

(I started without double quotes, but added them to make sure that value is of a string type)

My dataviewjs code passes page.drawing_time ?? "", as a value in a table row of dv.table(…) call.

As output I get 2 hours, 30 minutes which is not what I want, because I need output text to occupy very little space (I have a lot of things in my table and try to minimize space occupied by columns). Ideally I would like to see there what I typed in front matter, as is.

How can I achieve that? How can I opt out of automatic value meaning recognition?

---

Extra question: are there any plans for dataviewjs blocks to notrecognize value types by default and, instead, provide me with helper functions so I can do it on my own, under control? Something like:

// produces table with text values as they are provided
dv.table(
  ["date", "duration"],
  [["2021-09-29", "2.5h"]]
);
// produces table with date and duration rendered in a special way
dv.table(
  ["date", "duration"],
  [[dv.renderAsDate("2021-09-29"), dv.renderAsDuration("2.5h")]],
  { 
    disableFormatDetection: true,
  }
);

Asking, because it's not the first time when for my needs I have to trick dataview to avoid special render. I think previously I had similar case with some images rendering in a different way depending whether they were passed as-is to dv.table or (for some special reason) wrapped with <div> by me 🤔

[blacksmithgu]

For the first part, it's hard to do in YAML frontmatter since I don't have any syntax control over "this text should not be interpreted." The alternative which I haven't yet implemented is to add a special file.fields which includes both the interpreted and raw value. I believe you can do it via inline fields by explicitly quoting it ([key:: "value"]).

For the second part, there are a few coercion functions like dv.date() and dv.fileLink which will try to convert strings / links / whatnot to dates. I can add these for durations and numbers as well.

[nkoder]

to add a special file.fields which includes both the interpreted and raw value

sounds great, I love the idea of having access to raw values!

I can add these for durations and numbers as well.

Probably useful. I wanted to express with them what kind of do-not-interpret-values toggle I had in mind, but I probably wouldn't need them too much, as I rather need to remove their effect rather than add it 🙂