Manual rules currently must be run against individual tasks (as announced here). For larger projects it would be useful to trigger a manual rule against the entire project. I see this being used more frequently than running a rule against an individual task.
6 Likes
I saw the manual rules announcement - Introducing manual rule triggers! - News / Product Updates - Asana Forum - and got super excited. I then realized that the function to run it on an entire project was missing. This is actually what I was hoping for, so we can create rules for some data maintenance activities, run them once and move on.
I feel like the only weak area of Asana is that everything seems to run client side. It would be great if this function could work server side so it could trundle through hundreds or thousands of tasks and clean them up without sync issues.
3 Likes
@Steven_Smith @Jason_Green1 A possible workaround:
- Create a single select “action” field for triggering one or more rules
- Set the rule trigger to marking the action
- Add a rule action to clear the action field.
This will be able to run on multiple tasks as you can set custom fields for multiple tasks.
It can even run on entire projects but slower when selecting >50 tasks.
Credits to @Tiffany_Fung and @Richard_Sather for teaching me this. 
3 Likes
Would this require that I select multiple tasks to change the state of the “action” field?
The issue we run into is having projects with more tasks in them than are displayed when you first load the project. Asana progressively loads tasks as you scroll down a project page. This means that for projects with a lot of tasks, you have to scroll for a while to select all the tasks.
Is there a way to select all the tasks in a project without scrolling to get them to display and then SHFT clicking?
Thanks!
Not that I know of
When I first saw the release for manual rule triggers, I thought I read that it could do this and I was so disappointed this morning when I found out it can’t. A use case for us is that we have tasks that need to be added to calendars, but we don’t want to add them to the calendar until the project owner has started the project and reviewed them. I would like there to be an option for the project owner to just press “add to calendars” and it would add all relevant tasks within that project to the calendars.
The manual Rule trigger is great, but it stinks that it’s only per task. I have a large amount of tasks that can get out of sync with the status depending on various use cases. Or another scenario is I see a need for a Rule, and implement the Rule, but I can’t quickly fix the tasks that had already existed before this new Rule.
It’d be nice to grab a large group of tasks, trigger the rule, and let it run in batches instead of per task.
I’ve merged your post into an existing topic where you can click the title to scroll to the top and vote by clicking the purple Vote button.
Thanks,
Larry
1 Like
I would love to be able to multi-select and come to the bottom and run the rule from here.
Thank you for the workaround @Jan-Rienk!
6 Likes
Second. I was so excited to see the manual trigger option but I could not believe it was limited to only a single task. PLEASE add the ability to trigger a rule for an entire project (or portfolio).
1 Like