Re: Handling phone calls

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

Hi Bernt,

I tried to get your phone handling method running on my system, more for
education than for need. I had problems setting it up but I did get an
education !-)

The problem that I had is that when the Remember buffer was set up, the
entry contained the CLOCK-IN marker but no clock was running.  After
some head scratching, I found out that the sequencing seemed to be
wrong:

   my-phone-call() ->
     locally set the org-remember-templates to the special my-phone-remember-templates
     get a name and search bbdb
     call org-remember() ->
       call remember() ->
         run the remember-annotation-functions
         call remember-mode() ->
           run the remember-mode-hook functions

Now the value of remember-mode-hook was 

    (my-start-clock-if-needed org-remember-apply-template)

because of my initialization sequence: I first set up orgmode and
remember and then set up the phone handling: add-hook added
my-start-clock-if-needed to the beginning of the list - but that's
exactly backwards: when the hook is run, my-start-clock-if-needed is run
first, finds no CLOCK-IN marker in the remember buffer and does nothing;
then org-remember-apply-template is run and adds the template to the
remember buffer, CLOCK-IN marker and all.

I fixed the problem by modifying the add-hook invocation to add the
my-start-clock-if-needed function to the end of the hook:

(add-hook 'remember-mode-hook 'my-start-clock-if-needed 'append)

and everything seems to work properly.

I hope the fix and the explanation help anybody who is trying to
set this up.

BTW, thanks very much for posting this! I think this is the kind of
thing that can help org newbies like me get their heads around its
capabilities.  I've been taking baby steps into more capabilities and I
find that the documentation, good as it is, leaves me wondering about
how to use a particular feature (the usual questions that I have seen on
the list start with "what good is such-and-such?", where you can
substitute e.g tags, properties, dynamic blocks, column-view etc in the
question) and conversely, what org feature(s) could I use in order to
solve such-and-such a problem? Part of the problem is of course that org
provides mechanisms and it is up to you to figure out the best way (or
perhaps a good way - or even a bad way!) to get it done. So having
non-trivial, interesting, but simple to implement solutions to problems
such as the one you posed is indeed very welcome.

Regards,
Nick