Re: property searches for #+CATEGORY

[Bastien <bzg@altern.org>]

Adam Spiers <orgmode@adamspiers.org> writes:

> I have several personal .org files, and several work-related ones too.
> In each personal file, I have a line:
>
>   #+CATEGORY: personal
>   
> and in each work-related file, I have a line:
>
>   #+CATEGORY: work
>
> I would like to be able to bind agenda custom commands to do tag
> searches which are narrowed to one of these categories, e.g. "show me
> all personal priority #A tasks".  Such a search needs to span *all*
> agenda files, therefore the standard per-buffer narrowing provided by
> the '<' binding in the *Agenda Commands* buffer is insufficient.
>
> Would it make sense to include CATEGORY as a special property?  After
> all, pretty much all other per-task meta-data ("TODO", "PRIORITY"
> etc.) are already available via the property interface, and this way,
> I could easily achieve what I need with tag searches such as
>
>   CATEGORY="personal"+PRIORITY="A"

I understand now.

I think it would be clearer to distinguish between categorizing files
and categorizing tasks.  In a sense, using #+CATEGORY across several
files (as you do) is more a way to group these files under the same
ombrella (conveniently called "category"), rather than to group all
tasks below each #+CATEGORY in the same category.

Let me say it with other words: if several files share the same
#+CATEGORY, then this bit of information won't be of any help to
distinguish between these files' tasks, it will only help separating
files with #+CATEGORY: A from files with #+CATEGORY: B.

Then I think the right solution would be to have groups of agenda files.
Something like:

  #+AGENDA_GROUP: personal

This would let you restrict any agenda search to a group of agenda
files.  I don't want to digg too far in this direction, but I think
there are a few other things for which such groups might be useful 
(e.g. publish agenda files per group...)

My other concern is that the functionality you're requesting would
resurrect #+CATEGORY, while this functionality was mostly maintained 
for backward compatibility -- at least I understood it like that.  
It's not that easy for users to understand how to user categories, 
and staying with two ways of setting them might be confusing IMO.

PS: Personally, the problem you encounter is exactly the one that 
led me to use a single (really) big Org file.  But this is entirely
personal, of course!

-- 
Bastien