Re: [Orgmode] Re: Sorting TODOs with time-up

[Carsten Dominik]

On Mar 30, 2009, at 4:46 PM, David Engster wrote:

> Matthew Lundin <address@hidden> writes:
> > David Engster <address@hidden> writes:
> > > I guess this should be simple but somehow it's not working for me. I
> > > want to generate a todo list which is sorted according to the  
> > > scheduled
> > > date. Consider the following test.org file:
>
> [...]
>
> > > This minimal setup
> > >
> > > (setq org-agenda-files '("~/orgtest/test.org"))
> > > (setq org-agenda-sorting-strategy
> > >      '((agenda time-up priority-down category-keep)
> > >         (todo time-up priority-down category-keep)
> > >         (tags priority-down category-keep)
> > >         (search category-keep)))
> > >
> > > should sort TODOs according to time, right? But when I do
>
> > As far as I understand it, time-up sorts only by time of day in the
> > agenda view. I.e., it will place items that have been scheduled for a
> > particular hour at the top of the agenda.
> >
> > Here's some info from the docstring:
> >
> > ,----
> > | time-up            Put entries with time-of-day indications  
> > first, early first
> > | time-down          Put entries with time-of-day indications  
> > first, late first
> > |
> > | Pull out all entries having a specified time of day and sort them,
> > | in order to make a time schedule for the current day the first  
> > thing in the
> > | agenda listing for the day.
> > `----
>
> Thanks for the clarification. This is a bit confusing, since sorting  
> by
> priority works in the todo list, but sorting with date does not. Also,
> since I call the function 'org-agenda', it is a bit unexpected that  
> when
> I press 't' afterwards I don't really get an agenda but a TODO list,
> which seems to behave differently in some aspects from the normal  
> agenda
> view I get when pressing 'a'.

Yes, this is bad terminology, which evolved historically.

"org-agenda" is a dispatcher for the different views that we call  
"agenda views".

One of the "agenda views" is the global todo list (on `t'), another  
one is the
"daily/weekly agenda" (on `'a), which is a list of what is due today  
or this week.  I always try to call it explicitly "daily/weekly  
agenda" to avoid some of that confusion, but I agree, if I'd get a  
chance to start again I would use better terms.  Now these are so  
engrained in our mailing list culture and into tutorials etc that I do  
not dare to change them anymore.

> > There is the possibility of using a user-defined function. Perhaps  
> > you
> > could use that to sort by date.
> >
> > ,----
> > | user-defined-up    Sort according to `org-agenda-cmp-user- 
> > defined', high last.
> > | user-defined-down  Sort according to `org-agenda-cmp-user- 
> > defined', high first.
> > `----
>
> Unfortunately, this does not help, since there is no time  
> information in
> the entries 'a' and 'b' to sort by; it seems the timestamps are simply
> not extracted when building TODO lists.

Yes can use the text property on a, `org-hd-marker', which is a marker  
pointing to the original location of the item.  You can make your  
function go back to get this information.

For example with
 (org-entry-get (get-text-property 0 'org-hd-marker a) "SCHEDULED")

The most efficient implementation would be to first check if there is  
a `scheduled-time' or so property on the items.  If yes, use it.  If  
not, get the property and store it in a text property. This will be  
efficient because each item will probably be tested several times  
during the sorting.

The information is not extracted by default because that would take  
extra parsing time and it is usually not needed.

- Carsten