Re: Org Mode TOOD two way sync tool

["Christopher J. White" <orgmode@grierwhite.com>]

Hi Karra,

I've been working on org-toodledo.el to perform bi-directional sync of 
TODO items with the Toodledo server, and faced many of the same issues 
you raise about figuring out the exact format and grammar of a TODO item.

You may find looking at my source useful, either as inspiration, 
integration, or just understanding what fields are what.

The general approach was to build an object that represents a parsed 
TODO item, and fill that in from either the org-buffer TODO items, or 
from items retrieved from the server.  That object can then be compared 
to others (one from the server and one from the local buffer), converted 
to a new org TODO, sent to the server as a new TODO, etc.  The 
components of the TODO item are obviously targeted to what makes sense 
for Toodledo, but I think they are fairly generic.

You might also look at org-element.el which I recently learned about 
which may also help.  I have it on my TODO list to learn more about it 
to see if I can't refactor org-toodledo to leverage it.  It is more 
geared toward generic org items as opposed to specifically TODO items.

...cj

On 6/22/12 2:40 AM, Sriram Karra wrote:
> I am the author of ASynK (http://karra-asynk.appspot.com), a PIM sync
> tool and framework written in python that works across a variety of PIM
> providers such as Outlook, Google and BBDB. I am considering extending
> ASynK to do a bi-directional sync of Outlook tasks to Org Mode tasks. To
> be able to do this I need a working read/write API for reading and
> creating TODOs in org mode.
>
> *"Offline parsers"*
>
> My first preference is to be able to parser org files without required
> Emacs - this is the approach that I have implemented for BBDB sync. I
> considered PyOrgMode (https://github.com/bjonnh/PyOrgMode/network), but
> it appears unable to process TODOs, or even recurring events. To be able
> to extend PyOrgMode so I can read and write TODOs, I needed a full
> description of the format of TODO entries in all its forms. The Org
> manual itself has this information, I'm sure but scattered all over the
> place, given its real audience. Can someone point me to some sort of a
> concise representation, if any, of the org file format grammar?
>
> *org-protocol*
> *
> *
> By quickly reading the documentation I figured that org-protocol can be
> used to create entries, but is there a way to use it to do generic
> queries like "list all TODOs in a specified file, with a particular
> property value" and such?
>
> Any help is much appreciated.
>
> -Karra