I use unito.io heavily to sync projects in different workspaces. Over the last 2-4 weeks, it has suddenly started adding the subtasks to the project directly. Unito claims they have made no changes to how they handle subtasks.
So, on the Asana side, has there been a structural change to how Asana views subtasks within projects?
That’s really odd. No change that I’m aware of; I would think I would have seen it crop up in reports from Flowsana users but haven’t seen anything of this nature.
Hi @Bryan_TeamKickstart, I see some recent changes with subtasks and projects but those changes should not be live/in prod yet. The team that worked on that change is looking into this issue. I’ll let you know when I have more information from the team.
It seemed to be only when using Unito, but they claimed they made absolutely no changes to how subtasks are handled. So maybe a slight change rolled out in the API only?
From what you said, it sounds like the Asana dev team did deploy something and then rolled it back. Am I understanding that correctly?
@John_Vu - Not sure how recent this is, but I noticed today that subtask sections are no longer counting toward the subtask count in the subtask icon (that’s great news)!
@Bryan_TeamKickstart thanks for sharing. Our dev team couldn’t identify the cause of the issue, and we haven’t heard of other apps or users experiencing it either. We’ll reach out to the Unito developers to check which endpoints they are using and see if we can pinpoint the cause.
Could you also provide, us with step by step instructions on what you did to help us reproduce this issue.
@John_Vu - I have found the issue. And, while I am extremely embarrassed about my mistake, I do believe it exposed an important user experience change that is needed.
Here’s what happened:
Hundreds of subtasks that did not have direct relationships with the projects their parents tasks were in have started adding themselves to the parent task’s project over the last several weeks.
The reason why I was so absolutely convinced that the issue was either
a mistakenly deployed update to how subtasks are handled in projects
or, a change in how Unito handles subtasks.
…was because I have very long time experience in building and using rule automations in Asana and am very familiar with how they show up in task activity.
Task changes that are caused by rules always show up as the following:
“Asana changed …[DETAILS OF CHANGE]”
as seen in this screenshot:
This seems to be the case with all rules… EXCEPT AI rules.
I just realized that all the problematic tasks, hundreds of them, all were subject to a new AI rule I set up. It seems so incredibly obvious now because I have been experimenting for a few months with an experimental approach in an AI rule to find the matching client project. As I said, it seems obvious now, but wasn’t initially because the task update of adding the subtask to the project kept showing up as a change that I made, not “Asana”.
Previously, the only time task updates show up like this are when they are executed by my Zapier automations or by my Unito flows.
Because of this past experience, my brain was completely overlooking this rule as a common thread in all the problematic tasks.
Here’s the AI rule that executed on this:
Now, that seems blatantly obvious after the fact; however, the final factor that makes this so confusing is that sometimes the action shows up twice, once as having been executed by AI and once as being executed by me:
Anyway, two important things:
My sincere apologies for accidentally sending you and your team on a wild goose chase.
My strong recommendation: Actions executed by AI, including “Add to project” should should up as having been executed by “Asana” … i.e. “Asana added to [NAME_OF_PROJECT]”
This would keep the experience and formatting similar to the way other rule actions show up in Asana.
@Bryan_TeamKickstart Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for sharing the details of your issue.
We reached out to Unito’s developers, and they mentioned that you were the only user to report this problem. They suspected it might have been caused by a rule you had set up. It looks like you were able to track down the cause.
I’ve went ahead and sent your feedback to our rules team.