How can I create a link to an outline attachment in Org mode?

Question

I am trying to create links within the body of an outline to files that are attached to that outline using the guidance in the documentation

***** Test outline                                                    :ATTACH:
      :PROPERTIES:
      :ID:       385a7ddd-0bb9-478c-9b3c-9bd87f14b344
      :Attachments: test-file
      :END:

[[attachment:test-file]]

I realise my example is not identical to the docs but the item in the docs doesn't seem to have an attachment. When I click on my resulting link I get a dialog "No match - create this as a new heading?" which is exactly the behaviour for any internal link for which no heading matches i.e. it doesn't seem to be interpreting this as an attachment link. If I click 'Yes' it gives me a new heading attachment:test-file

What am I doing wrong? How can you create a link to an outline attachment?

Have you changed any of the defaults? If not, have you created a `data/` directory in the same place where the Org mode file is? Is there a subdirectory `38/` under `data/`? Is there a subdirectory `5a7ddd-0bb9-478c-9b3c-9bd87f14b344/` under `data/38/`? Is there a file `test-file` under `data/38/5a7ddd-0bb9-478c-9b3c-9bd87f14b344`? Is the file readable? AFAIK, `org-attach` does not add an `Attachments` property, so who added that? But if you created that `data/` directory and then did `C-c C-a a` giving it an existing file, then the link should work (and it does for me, FWIW). — NickD, Jan 14 '22 at 02:21
If you evaluate this in your `*scratch*` buffer: `(assoc "attachment" org-link-parameters)` what does it return? — NickD, Jan 14 '22 at 03:04

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited Jan 15 '22 at 16:01

The link is dispatched to a wrong handler, which means your org-attach package is probably not loaded yet. You can verify it by inspecting the org-link-parameters variable to check whether the attachment link type is present: evaluate (assoc "attachment" org-link-parameters) - if it returns nil, that means that org-attach is not loaded yet. You can also check by asking for help on one of its functions, e.g. C-h f org-attach: the doc string will say [Arg list not available until function definition is loaded.] in that case.

You can just add:

(with-eval-after-load 'org
  (require ‘org-attach))

to your init file (and restart emacs), so that all of the features that org-attach provides will always be available. Or invoke one of its autoload functions like org-attach or org-attach-dired-to-subtree before you try to follow an attachment link: that will trigger the autoload of the file which will add the attachment type to org-link-parameters and allow such links to be resolved properly.

How can I create a link to an outline attachment in Org mode?

1 Answers1