SMW queries

Here you can see some examples for simple queries using the metadata of a wiki page. You can add these queries to any wiki page.

Creating page lists

Show pages in a particular namespace

{{#ask:
[[:+]]  <!-- find all pages in the main namespace -->
[[Modification date::+]]<!-- necessary to filter deleted pages -->
|format=ul
|limit=4
}}

Output example in list style format:

• Accessibility
• Accessibility/Extensions
• Accessibility/Extensions/legacy list
• Accessibility/Extensions/notchecked

... further results

Notes:

[[:+]] shows pages from the Main namespace.

[[Myspace:+]] shows pages from the namespace Myspace.

[[:+||Help:+]] shows pages from both the Main namespace and the namespace Help (=OR argument)

Output in category style

{{#ask:
[[:+]][[Modification date::+]]
|format=category
|limit=12
}}

Output example:

A

• Accessibility
• Accessibility/Extensions
• Accessibility/Extensions/legacy list
• Accessibility/Extensions/notchecked
• Accessibility/VPAT BS4

A cont.

• AccessibilityReport.form
• Announcement/Log4Shell
• Announcement/XSS attack
• Apache license 2.0
• Attachments

B

• BSD 3-Clause
• BlueSpice 4.1
• ... further results

Show pages from a category

{{#ask: 
[[Category:Administration]] 
| limit=4 
| searchlabel=
| format=ol 
}}

1. Config manager
2. Extended statistics
3. Footer
4. Main navigation

Pages that start with the same page name string

{{#ask: 
[[~Visu*]][[:+||Manual:+]]
[[Modification date::+]]<!-- necessary to filter deleted pages -->
| limit=5 
| searchlabel=
| format=ol 
}}

List of pages in the Main namespace and in the namespace Manual that begin with "Visu".

Results format: Table

Format "broadtable"

{{#ask: 
[[~Visu*]][[:+||Manual:+]]
[[Modification date::+]]<!-- necessary to filter deleted pages -->
| limit=5 
| searchlabel=
| format=broadtable
}}

Format "datatable"

{{#ask: 
[[~Visu*]][[:+||Handbuch:+]]
[[Modification date::+]]<!-- necessary to filter deleted pages -->
| limit=5 
| searchlabel=
| format=table
| class=datatable
}}

Important!The format declaration

|format=datatable 

currently does not work with the BlueSpice skin. Instead, use the following syntax:

|format=table
|class=datatable

Date queries

Today

To ask for all pages that have been approved today:

{{#ask:
[[QM/Approval date::>>{{#time:Y-m-d|now -1day}}]]
}}

Search operators

If you want to look for results in a particular range, you can use search operators. See: https://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Search_operators#comparators

Templates

Customized output formats can be created using templates. The documentation for this can be found at semantic-mediawiki.org.

Here we show you some useful tips when working with templates.

Suppressing the namespace prefix

By default, the namespace prefix of a page is suppressed in the output formats "ul", "ol" (and other formats). However, if you are working with a template and therefore use the link=none parameter in the ask query, because you generate the link in the template yourself, then the page name is displayed with the namespace prefix. Sample query of all pages in the QM namespace:

{{#ask: QM:++Property "Modification date" has a restricted application area and cannot be used as annotation property by a user.
|format=plaintext
|template=mytemplate
|link=none
}}

The output here is in the format QM:My Page. To remove the namespace prefix, use the following syntax in the template, e.g. to generate an unordered list:

*[[{{FULLPAGENAME:{{{1}}}}}|{{PAGENAME:{{{1}}}}}]]

In this example, the full page name is linked via the "magic word" {{FULLPAGENAME}} and the page name without namespace prefix {{PAGENAME}} is used as the link label. The resulting output is My Page.

Related info

• SMW "ask" queries
• SMW result formats
• Using templates to create output formats