Allow Rules to trigger other Rules

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.

Rules triggered by one task should be able to affect other tasks, or even the project itself. For instance, a rules might say if Task A is marked with a certain field option, Task B would be assigned to a certain team member. Or if a particular task becomes overdue, the project status would be marked “At Risk.”

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Not sure why my post was moved here. Yes, rules should be able to trigger rules, but that wasn’t what my post was about.

agreed, this almost a “must” feature. I posted my bug here. I don’t how not having it is a feature. :thinking:

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Please Asana, make this happen. We all understand the complexities of allowing rules to trigger other rules as they might created endless loops. But put some restrictions, maybe you can only like 3 rules, or maybe all you need is to allow the task added to this project to be triggered by another rule, as mentioned above, that will solve most of the issues we are all finding.

We use rules to categorise work submitted through a form, with one master list of tasks and then boards for different teams, because I can’t trigger rules one a task is sent to X team board, I need to create all the category rules within the master board, but there is a limit of 20, so I need to then go back to manual work - which defeats the purpose of using Asana which is to simplify and automate Project Management.

FYI Flowsana rules can trigger other Flowsana rules; we don’t impose this restriction.

Genius. Upvoted.

It looks like Asana released the feature for rules to be triggered by other rules.

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They did release an update for this - details are here: