Support file.ctime/ mtime when querying tasks

[rushikb]

Hi there— I absolutely adore this plugin. Thank you so much for making it.

One of my favourite use cases at the moment is to use it as a collector for all the todos I generate over the course of a day— I use note refactor/ templater to ensure that every new note created on a day is preceded with YYYY-MM-DD — so by simply creating a query such as :

path includes {{Date}}

I get a fantastic overview of everything I created, along with the context )(filename>header). I want to try and replicate this when I do my weekly reviews, but because I don't always attach a due date for each task (which is one of the best things about GTD workflows) — I can't figure out how to create a template style query that can basically do something like:

not done
from files created in the last week

— is this feasible by any chance?

[schemar]

Hey there! Let's move this to the discussions section and talk about it 😄

[schemar]

First, let me understand better. What is it exactly that you want to achieve? Do you want all tasks from files that were created in a specific time range or do you want all tasks that were created in a specific time range?

For example: if I add a new task to a note from last week, should that task be listed in last week's overview or in this week's overview?

I am asking, because I am remembering a request for "creation date" on a task. And the question is whether that would help.
On the other hand, task lines are quite long already, so I am not sure adding another "created" date helps with readability 🙈

If your use case is specifically about files, adding ctime and mtime to queries wouldn't be hard, if I understand Obsidian's API correctly. Are there other use cases? Yours seems a little niche and resources I can spend on this plugin are scarce 😅 Are you a dev by any chance? I could help you create a PR for this feature.

But: first things first. Let's figure out first what it is exactly what we want 😄

[rushikb]

Hi @schemar — thank you so much for taking the time to look at this, and for making this plugin!

So here's the context:

To me, one of the most helpful bits of using GTD as a methodology in my day to day life is the idea of not attaching a due date to a task as soon as it's created— but rely on using contexts/ reviews to batch process them in a JIT manner

What I love about Obsidian tasks is that I can use a snippet like path includes {{Date}} in my daily notes template— and because I use the date as the start of every filename created on any day, it gives me a great overview with context (pagename -> header). This only works because of my ability to use the Path includes datename filter, rather than querying the actual date a note was created in. (here's an example of what that looks like for me )

But in a scenario where I wanted to do a weekly review — where I want to create a query to review all tasks from the last week that are not done, I can't seem to find an easy way to do that with Obsidian tasks if my tasks have no due date.

But this really is a long tail request, and I'm more than happy to have it scrapped in favour of anything else thats higher up— especially because I figured out a way to get to this point using dataview:

TASK where file.ctime >= date(today) - dur(7 day)
SORT file.ctime DESC

I wish I had the dev ability to do this (but I'm only capable of scraping by in Python and R and am useless at JS/ typescript).

[schemar]

OK, I understand. Thank you for the in-depth explanation.

So the answer to the following would be: the task is newer, but should still be listed in last week's overview.

if I add a new task to a note from last week, should that task be listed in last week's overview or in this week's overview?

Could you imagine a workflow that works for you where you could add a "created" date and/or a "scheduled" date to a task?

[rushikb]

Oh sorry, I missed that question, I think that's why file.mtime and file.ctime are both super useful- because I could then just create a query for tasks in all files modified in the last week.

But Just having Created date would be a great substitute- especially if you're integrating with nldates eventually.

Thank you for taking the time to look through this!

[wenlzhang]

It can also be very useful if tasks can be sorted based on the creation/modification date/time of the containing files.
#405

[claremacrae]

I would have found this useful today.

As a workaround, for now, I ended up writing a dataview query to do this:

```dataview
TASK
FROM ""
WHERE !fullyCompleted
WHERE file.mtime >= date(today) - dur(3 day)
SORT  file.mtime DESC
LIMIT 200
```

file.mtime is the modification date of the file containing the task, and dur(3 day) says look in files changed over the last 3 days (presumably 3 * 24 hours).

Use callouts for nicer presentation and a reminder to complete tasks via the Tasks plugin, if you care about logging completion date:

> [!NOTE]
> To get completion date logged, don't complete files in the dataview results.
> Open the corresponding file and mark the task completed there.

> [!TODO]
> ```dataview
> TASK
> FROM ""
> WHERE !fullyCompleted
> WHERE file.mtime >= date(today) - dur(3 day)
> SORT  file.mtime DESC
> LIMIT 500
> ```

[claremacrae]

I see there's a more succinct equivalent above: #93 (reply in thread)

[dzhuyx]

Hi, many thanks to the developers and maintainers for creating and constantly improving this wonderful plug-in! I wonder if there is a plan to add the creation date to tasks. My use case is to preview tasks that I want to complete in the next week, and I want to come back to the query to check how many of them were actually done, which requires the query to filter "created before xx date". This is because otherwise, newly created tasks will also be queried at the time of the review, and it makes things confusing.

I have looked at a few threads of discussions related to this issue and seen a few workarounds, but they don't do exactly what I want. My current workaround is to have a "live query" and a screenshot of "query at earlier time". This is quite confusing, and I feel having a creation date feature and corresponding filter will greatly help me.

[claremacrae]

Hi @dzhuyx,

I wonder if there is a plan to add the creation date to tasks

There have been various requests for storing the creation date of tasks and making them searchable, for example #575.

I can't say when or if it will be done, as there's a very long list of requests. I hope you understand.

[dzhuyx]

Sure. Thank you so much for the reply! And many thanks and congrats on this wonderful plug-in.

[claremacrae]

Gosh, thank you very much indeed.