Emacs orgmode Todo item automatically generates property drawer

Question

I use Emacs org-mode to organise my todo list. Recently I found under each todo item it automatically generates a property drawer containing a key ID and the corresponding value, something like this:

    ** TODO meeting XXX  
       SCHEDULED: <2014-07-12 Sat 14:00>
       :PROPERTIES:
       :ID:       46673B08-F9D9-4966-B70A-A2ADBC2ADE0E
       :END:
       Entered on [2014-07-08 Tue 20:40]

I have no idea how this property drawer is generated, and I did not have it before. If delete it, next time I start Emacs to read the file, it will come back again. What would I do?

Check out this related thread where abo-abo was suggesting the usage of `org-id-goto` and `org-id-copy`: http://stackoverflow.com/a/19620764/2112489 It looks like it may be the same thing you are seeing. — lawlist, Jul 08 '14 at 23:50
Do you mean I might perform `org-id-copy` accidentally? Is there any key binding for `org-id-copy`? @lawlist — hd810, Jul 09 '14 at 00:06
I'm not sure exactly how you are triggering it, but I think it may be safe to assume that the library `org-id` is being used. From a little bit of Googling and glancing at the source code of `org-id.el`, it appears that a common method of using `org-id` relates to links. Perhaps you could open up `org-id` and see if anything in there looks familiar, starting with the a word search for `interactive` to help you jump from one function to the next. Here is a link to the manual documentation section regarding links: http://orgmode.org/manual/Handling-links.html — lawlist, Jul 09 '14 at 01:34
This is not something that Org will do by default, but can be enabled via configuration. Could you share your org configuration from your init file? — Jonathan Leech-Pepin, Jul 09 '14 at 11:19

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 18 '14 at 12:34

2

Would you have used MobileOrg? If yes, that's the culprit (and that clutter is something more that keeps me away from using MobileOrg ATM).

answered Aug 18 '14 at 12:34

fniessen

4,408
19
18

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:23

Posting your configuration file would definitely help diagnose what's causing this. For some, this is the desired behavior of the org-id package, which is explained in Handling Links in the Org-mode Manual:

The library org-id.el must first be loaded, either through org-customize by enabling org-id in org-modules, or by adding (require 'org-id) in your .emacs.

An init.el / .emacs file that enables this functionality, might for example, include the following:

;; Use global IDs
(require 'org-id)
(setq org-id-link-to-org-use-id t)

;; Update ID file .org-id-locations on startup
(org-id-update-id-locations)

Additionally, you could check your .emacs.d directory to see if there is a .org-id-locations file, which is generated by the org-id package.

To disable this behavior, you should remove all org-id package related code from your configuration files.

It's likely that this behavior occurs every time you use (org-store-link), commonly bound to C-l l. You might also want to check out Assign IDs to every entry in Org-mode

Emacs orgmode Todo item automatically generates property drawer

2 Answers2