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Re: [Orgmode] FR: headline iteration API
From: |
Adam Spiers |
Subject: |
Re: [Orgmode] FR: headline iteration API |
Date: |
Tue, 10 Jun 2008 11:28:44 +0100 |
User-agent: |
Mutt/1.5.14 (2007-02-12) |
On Wed, Jun 04, 2008 at 04:35:01PM +0200, Daniel Clemente wrote:
> Hi,
> I find this very interesting. Some ideas:
>
> - Maybe it could provide access not only to the headlines, but to
> the headlines of the headlines, and of their headlines, etc. In
> fact, access to the whole tree. This would allow batch processing
> of any contents.
Absolutely - that was a core part of the intent of my proposal; I
probably didn't make that clear enough.
> As a plus, each header would get a path (like XPath in XML, or DOM
> in XHTML) and would be addressable. Maybe useful for links.
Whilst borrowing some of the XPath syntax would be an extremely cool
way of making content addressable, I do think it's a nice-to-have
which is separate to having an iteration API. Maybe later on the API
could be extended to only apply to subtrees matching an XPath-like
query, but that really would be icing on the cake. I feel that the
biggest wins (and very big too, IMHO) would come from a simple
iteration API.
> - An API would be useful not only to generate reports, etc. like in your
> examples, but also to execute actions on each header; for instance „export“
> each header, „delete“ it, ... (And now with latest version, each header can
> have different export options)
Agreed - it would open up many options for batch processing as well as
the reporting examples I gave before. I would personally use it to
convert some of my tags into properties. For instance I have tags
like 'sub60', 'sub2' to indicate that I estimate a task will take 60
minutes or 2 hours maximum, respectively. They could be converted
into the effort estimation property.
> - Of course, this is already possible by going through the file looking for
> headers; an API would make iteration easier, like with mapcar
Yes. There will be many intricacies involved in iteration, and
probably only Carsten knows them all - without an API we would
individually be reinventing the same wheel over and over ... badly.