How remove active date from a dynamic block using columnview

Question

This post explains how you can setup dynamic blocks to create tables based on meeting minutes.

In short, you can extract the TODOs of the minutes and put them in a table of actions like so:

* Actions
#+BEGIN: columnview :id global :match "/TODO|DONE" :format "%ITEM(What) %TAGS(Who) %DEADLINE(When) %TODO(State)"
| What                     | Who          | When            | State |
|--------------------------+--------------+-----------------+-------|
| Inventory of equipment   | :@Fred:      |                 | TODO  |
| Definition of main goals | :@Sara:      |                 | TODO  |
| Talk to companies        | :@Lucy:@Ted: | <2020-03-01 So> | DONE  |
#+END:

This uses the columnview dynamic block to automatically generate and keep the table up-to-date.

It works well except for the date. It extracts the active date in the <2020-03-01 So> format. This causes the insertion of an empty duplicated entry in my agenda view for this date.

Is there a way to convert the date to inactive, so it is displayed as [2020-03-01 So] in the table?

Answer 1

Thank you, @NickD for the tip. I posted to the mailing list and got a solution from Kyle Meyer. They are keeping the behaviour above, that is, keeping the active dates to prevent breaking other parts of the code and third-party libraries. And they are updating the docs instead.

Then, in my case, to remove the angle brackets, the solution is to add the following to my init.el file:

(defun my/org-columns-remove-brackets (_title value)
      (and (string-match org-ts-regexp value)
           (match-string 1 value)))

(setq org-columns-modify-value-for-display-function
      #'my/org-columns-remove-brackets)