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From: Christoph LANGE <ch.lange@jacobs-university.de>
To: Orgmode Mailing List <emacs-orgmode@gnu.org>
Subject: Bugs/features of accumulating property values when used with entries (concretely: in org-contacts)
Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2011 15:28:52 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <4EEB55A4.7090900@googlemail.com> (raw)

Dear all,

noticing the new feature "Property names ending in + accumulate" (as 
described on 
http://orgmode.org/Changes.html#accumulating-property-keywords – BTW, 
this exposes another issue with the fixed head bar on the new homepage, 
as the actual link target is hidden by the head bar), I thought I could 
use it in the property drawers of the entries of my org-contacts file, 
and noticed the following problems:

1. font lock (aka syntax highlighting) does not yet recognize :PROPERTY+:

2. accumulation doesn't work within the same entry; details follow:

For some of my contacts I'd like to record multiple phone numbers or 
e-mail addresses.  So far I have been doing that in an ad hoc manner, e.g.

* Contact Name
   :PROPERTIES:
   :EMAIL:    foo@bar.org, bar@baz.org
   :END:

While I have not yet automated my usage of org-contacts, I thought it 
would be more scalable and more accessible to future scripting if 
multi-valued properties had a clear multi-value representation.  (So the 
feature is not yet mission-critical for me.)  I thought that the new 
accumulation feature might be suitable for that.  (Or did I 
misunderstand the feature?)

So when I changed the above contact entry to

* Contact Name
   :PROPERTIES:
   :EMAIL:    foo@bar.org
   :EMAIL+:   bar@baz.org
   :END:

I would have expected (org-entry-get (point) "EMAIL" t) to evaluate to, 
well, at least "foo@bar.org bar@baz.org" (and in some later version of 
org-mode maybe to a two-item list, for even easier automated 
processing).  But I got the following unexpected results, which indicate 
that accumulation is not yet supported in this context (well, if it was 
ever _intended_…):

(org-entry-get (point) "EMAIL" t)  → "foo@bar.org"
(org-entry-get (point) "EMAIL+" t) → "bar@baz.org"

Cheers, and thanks for any help,

Christoph

PS:  org-contacts may not be the best tool to use anyway.  I like it so 
far, but if you know a better alternative that satisfies my 
requirements, I'd appreciate hints.  My requirements so far are:
* easily capturing information about contacts (addresses, birthdays, but 
also arbitrary other information)
* grouping contacts (e.g. by tagging them)
* linking to contacts from other org files
* for easy display and editing (e.g. like org columns)

-- 
Christoph Lange, http://www.facebook.com/ch.lange, Skype duke4701

next             reply	other threads:[~2011-12-16 14:29 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 8+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2011-12-16 14:28 Christoph LANGE [this message]
2011-12-26 14:16 ` Bugs/features of accumulating property values when used with entries (concretely: in org-contacts) Bastien
2011-12-26 14:50   ` Sebastien Vauban
2011-12-28 18:17     ` Christoph LANGE
2011-12-28 18:47       ` Eric Schulte
2011-12-29  8:03         ` Sebastien Vauban
2011-12-28 18:54       ` Thomas S. Dye
2012-01-21  5:48     ` Samuel Wales

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