Re: [O] How to programmatically use/edit data provided on capture

[Richard Lawrence]

Hi Marcin,

Marcin Antczak <address@hidden> writes:

> I got capture template with prompts to collect some properties:
>
> #+BEGIN_SRC
> * TODO %\1 / Some task description
>    :PROPERTIES:
>    :NAME: %^{NAME}
>    :END:
> #+END_SRC
>
> My question is: How to get information on user input data to transform
> this data before capture finalize.

I too have wanted to do something like this, but I am not sure that it
is possible without hacking org-capture, because I don't think you can
hook into the template processing at an arbitrary point.

Is it really important that you transform the data *before* capture
finalize?  If not, I think you could do this *during* capture finalize
by replacing, say, a pre-determined string "PUT-NAME-HERE" with the value of 

(custom-dashify-function (org-entry-get (point) "NAME"))

You could do that from org-capture-prepare-finalize-hook, maybe.  Would
that work for you?  It has some limitations:
  - it's only easy to recover data that was entered as properties or tags, not
    arbitrary strings
  - you can't continue to edit the capture buffer after doing this
    processing, since the hook will only be called after you start
    finalization 
 
If you come up with a better solution, I'd like to hear about it!  I
have scratched my head about this several times before, but I've never
come up with a satisfactory solution.

Good luck!

Best,
Richard