Allow filtering by file.day

[jenningsb2]

Hey! I would like to be able to limit the tasks to the ones that are greater than 5 days old—specifically ones tagged with #Waiting.

This allows me to see all of the tasks that are 'aging' (AKA I created them a few days ago, so I should probably up their priority or delete them).

Here is an example of how the dataview plugin handles it:

FROM ""
WHERE !completed
AND file.day < date(today) - dur(5 day)
AND contains(text, "#Waiting-For")

This is what I have so far with Tasks

not done
description includes #Waiting-For
sort by path reverse

[therden]

You can do that, @jenningsb2 -- just add a "due before in # days ago" filter, like so:

```tasks
not done
due before in 5 days ago
description includes #Waiting-For
sort by path reverse
```

[jenningsb2]

Thanks for the tip!

These types of tasks are associated with a journal page, not necessarily due. I am trying to surface tasks that were created a while ago (they exist on a older journal note), not necessarily ones that were due awhile ago!

I hope that makes sense.

[therden]

Hello @jenningsb2, sorry that I misunderstood. Tasks queries can't filter todo items based on the creation date of the file in which they are saved -- for that, you'll need to stick with Dataview.

[schemar]

@therden is right. It is not possible at the moment. I think this is a duplicate of #93?

[jenningsb2]

It is similar for sure! Wasn't referring to the page ctime, rather the file.day—my request applies to tasks on the daily journal pages (which is where most of my tasks are captured)

For example, if I wanted to surface all tasks that are associated with a daily journal that's greater than 5 days old tagged with #Waiting-For, I could write:

tasks
not done
file.day < date(today) - dur(5 day)
description includes #Waiting-For
sort by path reverse

This allows me to surface the things that I've been waiting for other people for for more than 5 days (tracking 'Waiting' task is common in the GTD methodology)

[therden]

Hello @jenningsb2.

The file.day and file.ctime variables are specific to the Dataview plugin; I don't believe that there's any way to access them from within a Tasks query block.

[schemar]

You can get the dates/times a file was created and last modified from the Obsidian API: https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-api/blob/master/obsidian.d.ts#L1077

In that sense, Tasks could make something like that available in its queries. I don't have time to add it, but a community contribution would be welcome. Shouldn't be too hard to do, actually 🤔

[jenningsb2]

@claremacrae its been awhile since I've bumped this thread! Is this something that is more probable in more recent versions of the Tasks plug-in?

I'm not sure if the Obsidian API has been updated to be able to detect File Day in a similar fashion to the Dataview plugin.

[claremacrae]

@claremacrae its been awhile since I've bumped this thread! Is this something that is more probable in more recent versions of the Tasks plug-in?

Please do not bump issues and discussions.

'Bumping' comments are incredibly unhelpful. They just cause a distraction from current work (and I was literally working on Tasks when I got the above message).

The most common effect of bumping comments is distraction and demotivation to work on the issue.

When I release new features, I update issues and discussions that are fixed by the new release.

I'm not sure if the Obsidian API has been updated to be able to detect File Day in a similar fashion to the Dataview plugin.

The way to find that out is to read the docs of the Tasks API.

[jenningsb2]

Apologies if this was distracting! That wasn't my intent.

It had been about a year since I surfaced the initial question about this type of filter.

If there isn't interest for this type of use case from the broader community, then I'll leave this discussion thread alone.

Thanks for your work on this plugin—it's much appreciated.

[claremacrae]

There are a lot of request that are more than a year old - but it’s interesting that nobody has upvoted this one.

This will likely happen at some point, when refactoring and feature efforts have got to the stage that it becomes easy to do.

[jenningsb2]

Great to hear! Thanks for responding 👍