Not sure if I found a bug. Can anyone reproduce or explain what is happening here:
I am setting up a Tag call “In Progress” so members can all see what tasks are actively being worked on.
I have Favorited this Tag for myself so I can quickly view all open tasks with this Tag whenever I feel like.
Everything was going fine in my testing, I could modify tasks, begin typing and the Tag would show in the list for me to select and add to the task. As a task was completed, the Tag would be manually removed before ticking as complete.
But sometime later when I had no tasks in progress, I could not begin typing this tag in a task I was editing. It wanted to make a new Tag, even though I could still see the Tag in my favorites and was still able to use in an advanced search. Adding it as new would make it a duplicate name and not the same Tag as before.
I dragged a task back into my Favorited to give a task the original Tag and then add it back to my original Project. Now I was able to edit other tasks and begin to type “In Progress” to show it as a selectable tag again.
The only workaround I know is to leave a completed task with that Tag applied to it. It works, but perhaps since I never explicitly deleted the tag and advanced search still knows about it, editing a task should still be able to show the old tag too.
Anyway I hope I explained myself. As I say I have a workaround so hopefully just bug reporting
No i didn’t revisit this at all. For my needs, leaving a completed task with the tag attached was enough to work around the problem. Normally a completed task does not show. And if you do change the filters to show completed, then logically a completed task means it is no longer “in progress” despite the tag I attached.
For other purposes this might not be appropriate. I suppose by definition though, a tag is meant to be a constant, and perhaps you should think about whether you should be removing tags so frequently. Maybe the project should be a Board instead of a List, but that didn’t suit my needs.
Personally I’d like to see the Task status to have a 3-state toggle: Incomplete, In-Progress, Complete. Or maybe there is a way of doing this another way in Asana.
I didn’t know how else to report this as a bug other than post to this forum. Its a good community here, I’d suggest describing the workflow problem you have and maybe someone can offer ideas.
Hi @Marty_Potter,
Thanks for your answer. My needs are different. In my workflow I need some additional steps in some cases and I am adding it as a tags. I am using an integration with slack to list all of them. It is very convenient for me.
I found silly workaround: From the list (empty) of tasks connected to the tag is possible to create task via email. When task is created it is possible to add tag to other tasks. Then you could delete task from the email.
I also find this frustrating. I’m using tags to keep informed of a projects status. Sort of like a content calendar. I have to constantly recreate one tag because it’s the least frequently used. And when it’s not being used it’s removed. Why do this? It makes no sense.
It is possible now to add this tag to other tasks - tags are searched correctly when I start to type the name of the tag.
I am removing tag-task associations.
When the tag is not used elsewhere (is not associated with any task) it starts to be impossible to add this tag to tasks - when I type the name system want to create a new tag with the same name.
I found the workaround - if I know id of the tag, I could go to the list of the connected tasks and there the option “Add task via email” is available. When I create tasks from an email it starts to be possible to add the tag to other tasks.
In my opinion, the problem is in searching functionality. The system returns only tags connected to tasks, but I am not sure it is correct behaviour.
I would not say it was a horribly serious issue, it’s just frustrating.
Having set up and educated staff on what tags to use in a workflow, its not possible to begin typing the name of those tags to autocomplete if they are unused. If a staff member doesn’t see the tag, they know they are using the wrong name and shouldn’t create one which could make searches have incomplete results.
Presumably the tag disappears to keep things neat and clean, but as I explained in my own thread, I have the Tag favorited, so it is technically still in use but nonetheless still disappears if not attached to a task.
I suppose what we really should be using is Custom Fields, but I am only a free user and can’t experiment with that
My sincere apologies for the SUPER late reply; only seeing this thread now, I’m still able to reproduce this issue; this isn’t a bug but just how the Tag system work at the moment. If a tag isn’t attached to any tasks, it’s will not be available as an existing tag but will have to be re-created. When I say the tag “doesn’t exist” and needs to be “re-created”, it is technically not true, since you can find it with its ID, but this is essentially what users see on their end.
I’ve removed “Bug” from this thread title, but kept the thread open to let users vote for this feature to be “clarified”.
I’m curious. What is the value in retaining easy access to an unused Tag, when you can easily create a new Tag that is exactly the same? From the user perspective it will behave in exactly the same way.
In my case it was some integration with external service. We were periodically querying Asana api using predefined set of tags. I think there is no option at the moment to query api using tag name instead of id.
For me, its about keeping some consistency amongst a Team. I agree its a limited problem with workarounds and depends on how you apply Asana to your own workflow, but it can cause some admin headaches.
Take the “In Progress” example from my thread. If there were no tags already in use with that exact display name in another task, it would not come up as a suggestion, and instead be created as a new tag (ie it has a different underlying programmatic ID). Anyone that had favorited the old ID (that is, still had the tag name in use) would not see that new task created by someone else in their list, even though the “new” tag had the same display name.
I hope that was clear. This is why I considered it a bug. Having two or more references to a tag with the same display name makes no sense since humans use the display name as the same identifier, but Asana considers them as different. This probably has other implications too on searches etc.
Perhaps the organisation admins need to be able to create a set of tags which always display in the suggestions list so team members know that these are tags the rest of the team uses and become immutable until removed.
In my case I created tags with emojis or colors, and to avoid having to re-create them I have a “parking task” somewhere with all the possible tags. That way, they never get deleted.
Those are good reasons. Thanks for responding. I wish I could provide more help.
As mentioned the work around is having a Task that only exists to retain the Tag.
Far from perfect, especially since the creation of a new Tag could easily be missed.
It probably won’t help your particular concerns, but as Tag users, you may find value in a new tool @Bastien_Siebman has been working on.
