You can probably use custom agenda commands for this. See the documentation
for the org-agenda-custom-commands and the corresponding section in the
manual [1]. You can set the org-agenda-files and
org-agenda-text-search-extra-files to point to the old project for some
custom search.
For instance, I use
--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
#+begin_src emacs-lisp
(setq org-agenda-custom-commands
(quote (
... Some custom commands
("N" . "Search in notes.org")
("Nw" search ""
((org-agenda-files '("~/org/notes.org"))
(org-agenda-text-search-extra-files nil)))
("Nt" tags ""
((org-agenda-files '("~/org/notes.org"))
(org-agenda-text-search-extra-files nil)))
... Some more custom commands
)))
#+end_src
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
This allows-me to perform a search only in my org/notes.org file without
actually changing my org-agenda-files.
--
Darlan
[1] - http://orgmode.org/org.html#Custom-agenda-views
At Sat, 23 Jul 2011 19:36:16 +0200,
suvayu ali <fatkasuvayu+li...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Orgers,
>
> I know that I can use `org-search-view' or `org-occur-in-agenda-files'
> from the agenda to search for some string on all my agenda files. And I
> can customise `org-agenda-text-search-extra-files' to include extra text
> files.
>
> These search functions are quite powerful in general, so I was wondering
> if these functions can be used to do a search restricted to say a list
> of files or to org files within a directory. If I could wrap these in my
> own functions, even that would be amazingly helpful.
>
> To illustrate a use case, I recently switched research projects[1]. I
> keep all my files related to the OLDPROJ under ~/org/OLDPROJ/ and all my
> files related to the NEWPROJ under ~/org/NEWPROJ/[2]. Now when I perform
> a text search I want to include only the NEWPROJ along with my agenda
> files (located in ~/org/). Now I would like to have an interface (either
> through the agenda menu or through some interactively called function)
> to perform a search _only_ on the OLDPROJ files when necessary. Is that
> possible?
>
> Any hints as to how I can achieve this would be amazingly helpful.
> Thanks. :)
>
>
> Footnotes:
>
> [1] I am using the word project rather loosely to describe a
> super-project with several sub-projects which are rather significant
> by themselves.
>
> [2] These project directories have their own structure based on
> sub-projects and other needs.
>
> --
> Suvayu
>
> Open source is the future. It sets us free.
>
