Re: [O] Easy to use asking for Or-gmode property values (e.g., for Org-contacts)

[Karl Voit]

* Karl Voit <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> This is why I came up with this idea: how about I paste new
> information at the end of and then call a function which helps me a
> lot:
>
> - ask for each property (or a set of pre-defined properties)
>   - prompt property name
>   - let the user mark a region using keyboard or mouse
>   - if user presses confirmation keyoard shortcut (return?)
>     - if region: copy the region and set it as the new content for the current
>       property (overwriting any old property settings)
>     - if no region is set: do not change property

Jonathan Leech-Pepin sent me his solution to the issue. Instead of
asking for a set of properties, he wrote a function that takes the
currently selected region, asks for a property, and overwrites its
value with the region string.

I found an edge-case which I fixed (by removing leading and trailing
whitespaces) and I added comments as far as I understood the code.

The resulting function is:
,----
| (defun my-org-region-to-property (&optional property)
|   (interactive)
|   ;; if no region is defined, do nothing
|   (if (use-region-p)
|       ;; if a region string is found, ask for a property and set property to
|       ;; the string in the region
|       (let ((val (replace-regexp-in-string
|                   "\\`[ \t\n]*" ""
|                   (replace-regexp-in-string "[ \t\n]*\\'" ""
|                                             (substring (buffer-string)
|                                                        (- (region-beginning) 
1)
|                                                        (region-end))))
|                  )
|             ;; if none was stated by user, read property from user
|             (prop (or property
|                       (org-read-property-name))))
|         ;; set property
|         (org-set-property prop val))))
`----

Thank you very much, Jonathan!

The only downside of this method is, that I have to wait four
seconds until Org-mode has parsed the list of possible properties
within my contacts.org file. 

Is there some kind of caching I could activate similar to (setq
org-refile-use-cache t)?

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