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: f...@bar.org, b...@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: f...@bar.org
:EMAIL+: b...@baz.org
:END:
I would have expected (org-entry-get (point) "EMAIL" t) to evaluate to,
well, at least "f...@bar.org b...@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) → "f...@bar.org"
(org-entry-get (point) "EMAIL+" t) → "b...@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
