org-collector.el — collect properties into tables

Lets look at the following org-collector block.

#+BEGIN: propview :id "december" :conds ((string= SPENDTYPE "food")) :cols (ITEM AMOUNT)
#+END:

To evaluate this block press \C-c\C-c with your cursor on the #+BEGIN line of the block. Evaluation will result in the following

#+BEGIN: propview :id "december" :conds ((string= SPENDTYPE "food")) :cols (ITEM AMOUNT)
| "ITEM"                           | "amount" |
|----------------------------------+----------|
| "Grocery Store [2008-12-01 Mon]" |    56.77 |
| "Restaurant [2008-12-08 Mon]"    |    30.67 |
|----------------------------------+----------|
|                                  |          |
#+END:

Lets look at the arguments one by one.

:id "december"

The :id argument has the effect of limiting the search to headers under the header with the id of "december".

:conds ((string= SPENDTYPE "food"))

The :conds argument accepts a list of e-lisp expressions. Only headlines which match all of these expressions will be displayed in the table. The names of properties of a headline, in upper cases, can be used as variables in the expressions. This particular expression only returns true when the SPENDTYPE property of a headline is equal to "food".

:cols (ITEM AMOUNT)

The :cols property controls what each row of the table should look like. In this case we are showing ITEM which shows the actual text of the headline as well as AMOUNT which show the value of the AMOUNT property of each headline.

This example demonstrates a couple of new headline arguments for org-collector.

#+BEGIN: propview :cols (ITEM (+ 400 AMOUNT)) :scope tree :match "example"
| "ITEM"                                                                          | "(+ 400 AMOUNT)" |
|---------------------------------------------------------------------------------+------------------|
| "December Spending                                                   :example:" |                0 |
| "Week One"                                                                      |                0 |
| "Grocery Store [2008-12-01 Mon]"                                                |           456.77 |
| "Athletic club [2008-12-02 Tue]"                                                |            475.0 |
| "Week Two "                                                                     |                0 |
| "Restaurant [2008-12-08 Mon]"                                                   |           430.67 |
|---------------------------------------------------------------------------------+------------------|
|                                                                                 |                  |
#+END:

:cols (ITEM (+ 400 AMOUNT))

Notice that the :cols list in this example contains an elisp expression for one of the column values. It is possible to run arbitrary elisp over the header properties the results of which will be used when building the resulting table.

:scope "tree" :match "example"

The :scope tree and :match header arguments limits the included headlines to those which have a tag matching "example" or their descendents.