Tasks and Dataview failures in iOS

[joelneely]

What happened?

I have a couple of puzzling inconsistencies that recently emerged regarding Tasks and Dataview when sharing a vault between the MacOS and the iOS implementations of Obsidian.

On iOS:
Obsidian 1.8.9 (195)
Dataview 0.5.68
Tasks 7.21.0

On MacOS:
Obsidian 1.9.10 (was 1.8.x before 1.9 became generally available)
Dataview 0.5.68
Tasks 7.21.0

Context:
I have a template for my daily notes that includes Dataview queries to show “to do” and “done” tasks for the current date. The “to do” query is:

dv.taskList(
    dv.pages().file.tasks
    .where(t => !t.completed)
    .where(t => t.text.includes("{{date:YYYY-MM-DD}}")) )

The “done” query follows the same pattern, but (obviously) removes the negation from the filtering lambda.

These worked well for many months (over a year), through multiple version upgrades of Obsidian and the relevant plug-ins. My vault is synched via Obsidian Synch between my MacBook Pro and my iPad Pro.

First issue:
I recently installed Smart Connections 3.0.78 on MacOS (while still running Obsidian 1.8.x), intending to experiment with connecting Obsidian to Ollama. (I did not install it on iOS.) After installing that plugin, the query results on MacOS continued to work, but the same pages displayed “no results” in iOS.

As of the moment, after disabling the Smart Connections plugin and upgrading Obsidian on MacOS to 1.9.x, the “no results” failures on iOS seem to have stopped. I’m still watching to see whether that issue reappears.

Second issue:
For as long as I can recall, checking a task to indicate completion resulted in its appearance changing to “strike through” formatting and the additions of a green checkbox emoji followed by the date on which it was completed. Recently that behavior changed, depending on which app I used to mark the task complete.

If I mark the task complete on MacOS, the familiar appearance occurs in both apps (MacOS and iOS): the green checkbox emoji appears. However, if I mark the task complete on iOS, there is not green checkbox; instead, the word “completion” in a monospaced font appears, followed by the completion date. The task is displayed in that way on both platforms.

The inconsistency is a bit jarring and confusing, and I don’t remember it happening in past months.

Conclusion:
I understand that the combination of plugin changes (Smart Connections installation and then disabling, on MacOS) and Obsidian version upgrades (on MacOS) increase the challenge of root-cause identification. But I hope that this either will be recognizable, with some correction possible, or add to a body of knowledge with other reports that can contribute to that identification.

DQL

dv.taskList(
    dv.pages().file.tasks
    .where(t => !t.completed)
    .where(t => t.text.includes("{{date:YYYY-MM-DD}}")) )

JS

Dataview Version

0.5.68

Obsidian Version

1.8.9

Device

iPad Pro 13-inch (M4) A2925 2024

OS

iOS 18.6