Allow Rules to trigger other Rules

I posted this as a Bug here but apparently it is intended behaviour as a of right now.

The situation is this: I have a master project and multiple other individual projects. I have Rules to automatically copy tasks created in an individual project to the Master project, which is a great use of Rules. However, I would also like categorization to happen to rules in the Master project, for example to mark new tasks as “Not Started” and to assign them to me. At present, a task that is added to the Master project by a Rule will not trigger Rules in the Master project that change status or assign them. For assignment, I can work around this by including individual Rules in each individual project, but there is no workaround for changing status, since only the Master project has a Status field (and you can’t share a field across projects).

I recognise the danger of creating infinitely looping Rules, but having them silently not trigger is both confusing and very limiting in terms of what Rules can do. I think that setting some limit on the number of cascading triggers would prevent infinite loops, or some other method of detecting them directly.

I have a new scenario, which leads me to highlight in some cases you do not want to have Rules trigger other Rules naively and without some care involved. For example, I currently have a rule to complete a task if status is set to Done, and also a rule to set status to Done if I complete the task, which means I can trigger both actions from either end. Obviously this would fail if it became an infinite loop. I think that some thought about whether or not a loop is stable or not should come into play, since in this case the Rule would not change anything on triggering and so would not need to trigger.

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Hi!

I can’t make this work. I have a rule in one project that adds any new task to another project. In the destination project I have another rule that should be triggered when a new task is added to the project. Whenever I add a task by hand it works but when it is added by the first rule it doesn’t. Am I doing simething wrong or is this functionality not supportet yet?

Thanks

Mate

Hi @Mate,

You’re not doing anything wrong! It’s not supported - you can’t trigger a rule based on another rule.

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It’s a shame. Thanks Phil!

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Hi @Mate :wave:t5:

Sorry about the trouble here. As @Phil_Seeman has explain, this is not possible in Asana yet. I have moved your post to an existing thread we have regarding this topic and I would encourage you to cast your vote on the thread.

Thank you for reaching out in the Forum and have a great Friday!

Hi Natalia, Any updates on this issue? I bump into the same need and noticed Asana does not support this function yet. Vote for this feature request!

I am also keen to use rule triggers rule!!

  1. Rule: On board view, cards are moved according to change in priority field and due date is added.
  2. Rule: Priority is changed when card is moved to certain column.

This means, Rule 2 should trigger Rule 1.

On a side note: The issue also applies when forms are handed in setting priorities. Then Rule 1 should fire.

Rules was the reason to upgrade my subscription in Asana to business. Please make it easier and more useful for us to use them properly. Thanks!

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Thanks @Calum_You , because this is my current dilemma right now! :neutral_face:
I have Projects A and B and a rule on A to add a task to B once it’s moved to a specific section.
I have another rule on Project B to set a custom field once any new task is added to it but this rule is not triggered. I was running away from manually adding the task in the other project but seems that way.

I am surprised to see how few people have voted on this thread as this creates a huge amount of manual work. If you create a new section in a project and you want to change a little the way you sort information you need to “hunt” all projects that have rules connected to this project and update them, rather than just updating the rule locally.

BTW some kind of schema which rule is connected to what will be a great asset, as when rules becomes a lot it is hard to see an overall picture

Yes, unfortunately it doesn’t seem like there’s much movement here since this has been the status quo for months now. My current preferred system is to use a project template that has the rules I need in each individual project set up already, but modifying this across all projects is a thankless task. Honestly, it has greatly decreased my use of Asana.

I can understand the thinking behind it, since you can set up an automation that lands a task in a projects where there are 10 other automations that may kick in. If you do not have access to the target project you will be “blind” as to what your automation will trigger.

However it seems that a lot of companies have a designated person or team to create automations and this will not be an issue.

My suggestion is that there is a tick box in the rule creation which says “this rule triggers other rules”. If it is not marked Asana works as it does in the moment, if it is marked then all others rules in the target project kick in. @Marie what do you think?

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That’s a great idea @IvanStaykov! I think that indicating what action will result in the target project from rules triggering other rules will be an important prerequisite!

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Even worse, rules invoking other rules can potentially lead to a circular loop condition where rules may invoke each other into an endless loop. And those are extremely hard to detect ahead of time, and not so easy to catch even as they are happening.

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Didn’t think of that, but you are quite right

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I think, from the comments here it’s apparent that the most restricting aspect of rules not triggering other rules is the case that the trigger “When a task is added to this project” doesn’t get triggered by other rules.

If only this was working, many currently impossible use cases would already be possible (including the one I just ran into which brought me to this thread) and for this specific trigger, I don’t see any need to show any consequences or the risk of having a loop.

(If a trigger added a task T from project A to another project B and within that project a trigger would add T to project A, because T is already in project A there would be no loop.)

So you might want to prioritize this trigger over the entirety of the feature as it could provide a lot of value to customers much faster than getting the entire big feature right.

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I would really like the Rules feature in Asana to be able to trigger other rules. We have some projects that are very closely integrated with one another and it’s proving to be very difficult to have these rules run across different projects when one rule cannot trigger another rule, especially with the 20-rule limit. Since not as many users are on the business plan vs. the premium plan, this probably won’t get many upvotes, but it seems like a pretty quick-fix that would probably make business users very happy.

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Thanks for sharing your feedback with us, @anon5797104! We already have a thread on this topic so I’ve gone ahead and merged your post with the main thread to consolidate feedback!

Is there any update on this - is it something being investigated / developed? I’m particularly keen on the same as Cihat mentioned: the trigger “When a task is added to this project”

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Asana does not communicate on the roadmap so you won’t have a definitive answer from them. You can consider using Zapier or Flowsana for some of the automation.