On Sun, Jan 9, 2011 at 08:58, David Maus <dmaus@ictsoc.de> wrote:

> At Mon, 20 Dec 2010 14:12:39 +0000 (UTC),
> johnt wrote:
> >
> > I am trying to set a custom command to show my work tasks and critical
> home
> > tasks for the day.
> >
> > I have tried the following.
> >
> > (setq org-agenda-custom-commands
> >       '( ("W" "Work Schedule"
> >          ((agenda ""
> >            ((org-agenda-filter-preset '("@Work|critical"))   ;; this
> doesn't work
> >             (org-agenda-ndays 1)))
> >           (tags-todo "@Work|critical")))
> > )
> >
> > It seems just to ignore the filter. The tags-todo line works fine.
> >
> > I tried various filters to verify my syntax.
> > using (org-agenda-filter-preset '("+@Work")) works fine but is not what I
> want.
> > using (org-agenda-filter-preset '("@Work" "|" "critical")) also doesn't
> work.
>
> There are some errors in your `org-agenda-filter-preset':
>
>  1. You should not quote this list, because the entire structure of
>    `org-agenda-custom-commands' is already quoted.
>
>  2. Format of `org-agenda-filter-preset' (C-h v
>    org-agenda-filter-preset RET):
>
>   ,----
>   | A preset of the tags filter used for secondary agenda filtering.
>   | This must be a list of strings, each string must be a single tag
> preceded
>   | by "+" or "-".
>   `----
>
>   So ("@work" "|" "critical") is wrong format.
>
>  3. The preset filter ANDs the tags together and as far as I am aware
>    of (our could think of) it is not possible to OR tags together.
>    However, I wonder why you would like to set the preset-filter: The
>    tags-todo query already selects only tasks that are either tagged
>    @work or critical?
>
> HTH,
>  -- David
> --
> OpenPGP... 0x99ADB83B5A4478E6
> Jabber.... dmjena@jabber.org
> Email..... dmaus@ictsoc.de
>

Thanks for the reply.  It turns out that most of this did not matter.  I was
mostly
concerned with this for export and use with Mobile Org.  For these it seems
to
process all the custom commands together.  This seems to act like a block
agenda
which does not support filtering of individual blocks.  I could get one
custom command
to export or push to mobile org correctly but with more then one the filters
were ignored.
I ended up having to write some custom functions to process the commands one
at
a time to temporary files and then combine the files. The or'ing of tags not
being
supported is still an issue but I changed my usage to get around that.

Thanks for the tip on "C-h v org-agenda-filter-preset RET" to get
information on a variable.
There is just so much to learn.

John