I think if you multi-home the Tasks so you have 1 project for the shareable fields and 1 project for fields you don’t want to share that would be the only way to do this. Asana has no ability to share or not share certain fields.
I just tested this on a fresh trial account.
Steps:
- Create project A for internal use
- Make a new custom field for some sensitive info in project A that you don’t add to your org wide library, e.g. I tested with a confidential single select/dropdown field
- Create a task in project A and fill in that field.
- Create a new project B, to be shared with some external users like clients
- Multi home the task/add it to project B as an additional project (using Tab + P)
- Invite a new external guest to project B
- When that guest accepts your invite and logs in, they will see no mention of the custom field made in step 2 above, not in the table nor the task detail view.
There is a lot of confusing back and forth on this and other forum posts regarding this. Can someone confirm if I’m missing some place where that secret field could appear/be leaked to my external guest? Or is this an official safe way to store extra data for internal eyes only?
If anyone finds this, I can confirm that if you multihome a task in two projects, and only have a custom field in one of the projects (e.g., an internal project), guests will see custom fields from project A even if they are only a guest in project B, where that field is not used. This means there is no way to have a custom field in asana that is private to internal teams only, without manually duplicating tasks and managing those duplicates by hand. Total deal breaker for our company.
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I believe this is actually not the case:
If Internal Project A has a local custom field named “test” and a task with test’s value set to Option 1, and the field is multi-homed to Project B, then that custom field will only be visible to those with access to the project (A) where the field is defined (locally). They will see global custom fields, but not test.
Here’s what it looks like if they do have access to Internal Project A:
The tooltip explains why it’s visible–partially. It only says it’s visible to member’s of the field’s project, but I just confirmed it’s visible to those who are not members but otherwise have access (due to team membership and public-to-team project).
Thanks,
Larry
There’s some nuance - if you use a library field, then the guest WILL see it. Only if you manually re create your custom fields on each project as project specific fields then a guest won’t see it. This isn’t scalable if you run any large company w/ repeated fields e.g. sprints, or budget fields if you’re an agency.
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This would absolutely be a valuable/welcomed change. However, I’m concerned that this request has been lingering since 2017. At this point, as a SharePoint Admin/Dev/SME/etc, I’m trying to evaluate if Asana could be used by more of our users to create simple workflows. Power Automate is a bridge too far for many of them.
What I would really like to see is something like the following:
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Custom fields can be defined as read-only. This means only workflows or integrations can update, not Editors. I could maybe see the case for allowing project admin or workflow creator to edit…
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Custom fields can be hidden from the Board, the List, and the Task views for Editors/Commenters/Guests. This would be the case where you have “confidential” fields or behind-the-scenes fields that certain groups should NOT see or don’t need to see (clutter).
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For debugging purposes, custom fields should not be hidden from workflow creator or project admin.
From reading all of the replies on this thread, I’m not sure if my request is already encompassed.
Thanks for any updates on this!!!
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As someone who has used free Asana and upgraded recently to starter, I have to weigh in and say that this is a big oversight in the UX of custom fields.
You should be able to set them to hidden or visible by default if they aren’t in use for that task yet. So this should be task specific as sometimes you have different task types within a single project and you don’t want to bloat the layout of all tasks for the sake of 10% of them needing a few custom fields.
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We need the ability to lock users from editing custom fields. There are fields we need for tracking and reporting that project users have no business modifying.
This would be a great feature to add as we desire the ability to make certain administrative custom fields un-editable by developers (e.g. Approved Billable Hours", while allowing them full edit ability to Asana tasks. Our customers have asked for this functionality…
I would love to be able to have certain columns in a project VIEW ONLY so no change can be made whatsoever.
Adding to this request with our scenario, we are an agency and we want to be able to share out projects with contractors & customers. But there is some information in a project that we only want internal people to be able to see.
Currently when I share a project they can see everything, ideally I’d be able to chose on a column and/or view level if guests can see it.
In the perfect world, I’d create a client view and they can only see that.
Both of the requests in this thread are now available:
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Thanks @lpb and @Phil_Seeman
Good catch!
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