org-babel: define commands for all named source blocks in given set of files

Question

This answer shows how to define a command that executes a named org-babel source block. If you want to do this for all named source blocks in a file, you could define one command per block. That's cumbersome.

I'm looking for a function that defines commands for all named blocks in a given set of files.

• the function should be placed in init.el to define commands for all named source blocks in a set of files
• the command names should prefix something like 'my-org-babel-' to all block names
• in case of duplicate block names, the latest one encountered can be retained

Answer 1

Here is some code to do almost (but not quite) everything you want. The following two functions are to be added to your init file:

(defun my-org-babel-make-func (name)
   "Construct a string defining the function, then parse the
   string into a Lisp s-expression and eval that to actually
   define the function."
   (let ((s (format "(defun my-org-babel-%s () (interactive) (org-sbe \"%s\"))"
             name name)))
      (eval (read s))))

(defun my-org-babel-function-maker(filename)
   "Map the form over all the code blocks in the file. The form
   gets the name of the block and if non-nil, calls the make-func function
   to define the function for that name."
   (org-babel-map-src-blocks filename
     (let ((name (plist-get (cadr (org-element-at-point)) :name)))
        (when name
           (my-org-babel-make-func name))))
      nil)

I hope the comments are enough to convey what the functions are doing.

Then if you have an Org mode file foo.org with named code blocks like this:

* foo

  #+name: hello
  #+begin_src emacs-lisp
  "Hello"
  #+end_src

  #+name: good-bye
  #+begin_src emacs-lisp
  "Good Bye"
  #+end_src

you can execute (my-org-babel-function-maker "foo.org") and then you should have commands my-org-babel-hello and my-org-babel-good-bye that you can execute with M-x my-org-babel-hello or M-x my-org-babel-good-bye.

If you want this to be done when you open the file you can use a file local variables block to execute the function maker when the file is opened:

... named code blocks as above ...

* COMMENT Local variables

  # Local variables:
  # eval: (my-org-babel-function-maker (buffer-file-name))
  # End:

Caveats:

• no error checking
• blocks with duplicate names are not handled the way you want: org-sbe will execute the named code block - if there is more than one code block with that name, it will run whichever one it wants: which one that is depends on the implementation of org-sbe and is outside the scope of this answer. I would suggest you avoid blocks with the same name in the file.
• it would be nice if these functions were defined locally for this file only, but that's not the way it works: functions are global in scope in Emacs Lisp, so my-org-babel-hello will exist everywhere. If you execute it in a different file that has a code block named hello, it will happily run that code block; and if there is no such code block, it will complain.