Re: Using properties for diary-anniversaries

[Nick Dokos <nicholas.dokos@hp.com>]

lecodesportif@eml.cc wrote:

> On Mon, 24 Jan 2011 09:36 -0500, "Nick Dokos" <nicholas.dokos@hp.com>
> wrote:
> > Yes, sorry: I figured that I had answered the wrong question after I
> > sent it, but I was too tired to fix my mistake at that time. However, I
> > could not make your formulation work for me at all. I still don't
> > understand how it could possibly work: afaict, org-entry-get returns the
> > birthday as a string, "5 4 1900", the read returns the month as a
> > number, 5, and diary-anniversary should blow up because it needs at least
> > two
> > arguments (a month and a day) - and it does in my case.
> 
> You're probably right, there was a typo in my example. The below text is
> corrected, I had forgotten the parantheses for the date!
> 
> * John
>   :PROPERTIES:
>   :Name: John
>   :Birthday: (5 4 1900)
>   :END:
>   %%(apply 'diary-anniversary (read (org-entry-get nil "Birthday")))
>   John
> 
> Does this work for you?
> 

Yes it does, but having to remember to enter dates as lists in this
particular context does not feel right. It'd be OK if all dates were
entered as lists in org, but that's not the case. I'd rather parse a
more obvious representation.

> > Be that as it may, re. filling in the name, I don't know how to do it
> > and I'm not sure that it can be done: the string after the function call
> > is scanned for %d but no other evaluation is done. org just passes the
> > string along and all of that work is done in diary-anniversary whose
> > doc string says:
> > 
> > ,----
> > | The diary entry can contain `%d' or `%d%s'; the %d will be replaced
> > | by the number of years since the MONTH, DAY, YEAR, and the %s will
> > | be replaced by the ordinal ending of that number (that is, `st',
> > | `nd', `rd' or `th', as appropriate).  The anniversary of February 29
> > | is considered to be March 1 in non-leap years.
> > `----
> 
> Yes, it may require hacking diary-anniversary.
> 

Or perhaps investigate Julien Danjou's org-contacts (still work in
progress). Or give bbdb another chance...

Nick