oca

Org Capture Anywhere (oca) allows you to use Org Capture for capturing items anywhere.

Many times I need to capture structured text items that have to go in places that are not Org mode files. For example, to create tasks in Jira or Trello or adding an event on Google Calendar. This package provides simple functions to extend Org Capture’s final destination.

Once installed, call oca-setup for setting up capture hooks. Then define your capture workflow by writing a template and specifying a push function. The push function takes AST of captured Org item via org-element API and does whatever it wants with it.

Here is an example to log lines in an SQLite database. We first define a push function that takes a headline entry and pushes the title to our database.

(defun oca-push-my-db (element)
  (let ((text (org-element-property :raw-value element)))
    (call-process "sqlite3" nil nil nil
                  "db.sqlite3" (format "insert into data (line) values (\"%s\")" text))))

Then write a capture template using oca-visit and the push function defined above.

(setq org-capture-templates
      '(("s" "Capture to SQLite" entry (function (lambda () (oca-visit #'oca-push-my-db)))
         "* %?")))

Now capturing items using C-c c s will put the line in the database.