Re: [Orgmode] sorting entries on date created?

[Carsten Dominik]

On Apr 29, 2009, at 7:41 PM, Nick Dokos wrote:

> Marko Schütz <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> > I use remember to add todo entries. Mine look like this
> >
> > ** TODO kpdf as standard pdf viewer from auctex
> >   [2008-07-19 Sat]
> >
> > where the inactive timestamp is added at creation.
> >
> > I'd like to use org-sort to sort such entries by creation date. I'd
> > assume I could use sorting-type ?f with a suitable getkey-func. So,  
> > is
> > there already a function in org that I could use to extract this  
> > date?
>
> Not sure if this helps (it does not answer your question directly):
>
> There are two places in org-sort-entries-or-items (which is called by
> org-sort under the conditions at hand) where a regexp, org-ts- 
> regexp, is
> used when sorting-type is selected to be ?t: one is for when you are
> sorting plain lists and the other is when you are sorting top-level
> entries or the active region. If you change the relevant instance of
> org-ts-regexp to org-ts-regexp-both, it will match both active and
> inactive timestamps and sort appropriately. I have not tried to figure
> out what happens if there are multiple timestamps, active or inactive,
> in an entry. But if you just have a single inactive timestamp per  
> entry,
> as you have indicated above, that should work.

Hi

the real problem is to find the correct time stamp even in entries
that have multiple time stamps, just as Nick is saying.

Your best bet will indeed be to write a custom sorting function
for ?f, because the way this function has to be written depends
on how your entries look.

For example, if we assume that the creation time is the first
inactive time stamp that is at the beginning of a line (to exclude
things like a CLOSED time stamp), you could use

(defun sort-by-creation-time ()
  (let ((end (save-excursion (outline-next-heading) (point))))
    (if (re-search-forward (concat "^[ \t]*\\[" org-ts-regexp1 "\\]")
                           end t)
        (time-to-seconds (org-time-string-to-time (match-string 0)))
      (time-to-seconds now))))


HTH

- Carsten