Re: [O] [feature request] Org as an Excerpt Database (or Multivalue Properties)

[Christian Moe]

Hi,

I've successfully used the regular expression searches Herbert Sitz 
describes to search and query a small (~ 500 kB) Org database of all 
my source materials (text clippings) for a project, where some of the 
properties I used had multiple values.

You will find Matt Lundin's Advanced searching tutorial invaluable:

http://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/advanced-searching.html

Org has some basic support for multivalue properties, mainly for 
editing (getting, putting, adding, removing) and also a membership 
test. See the manual:

[[info:org#Using%20the%20property%20API]]

Note that unlike your example setup, the values are not comma-separated.

The multivalue support does not, as far as I remember, extend to match 
expressions for searches etc. This would probably be non-trivial to 
implement. Something could probably be cobbled up with 
org-entry-member-in-multivalued-property. But regexp searches are 
fairly simple to use, and work now.

You'll want to think carefully about what you put in properties, what 
you put in tags, and what you put in multi-value properties, with a 
view to making this easy to search and change as your file grows.

Yours,
Christian



On 12/11/11 1:09 AM, Herbert Sitz wrote:
> Sven Bretfeld<sven.bretfeld<at>  gmx.ch>  writes:
> > A property search for "code-writing" should match this citation and all
> > others with this property. An additional search for "career" should
> > narrow the matches down. But orgmode understands "money, ... ethics" as
> > ONE value, not FOUR. That's the problem.
>
> Sven --
>
> I think you should be able to get results you want using "regular expression"
> searches on your 'keyword' field.  E.g., the following tags-todo search should
> find headings that have both 'career' and 'code-writing' in a 'keyword' 
> property:
>
> keyword={career}keyword={code-writing}
>
> This search would find headings that had one or the other or both:
>
> keyword={career\|code-writing}
>
> Regular expressions start out simple but can get very complex.  I expect there's
> a way to get whatever you want out of the "multi-value" property strings you
> want to use.
>
> -- Herb