Hi,
I am trying to set a rule. When a task is marked complete and it moves to another project (waiting for approval section, our manager has to go through the task before approving them), it will be set as approval. Now the problem is that the “moved” task that I set for approval is already approved when it moves to a particular section. How to set a rule that set a task as unapproved.
Hi,
With rules action at the moment you can’t change the approval status, this is just not available. Other tools might help, and you can definitely custom code an action in Zapier for example using the API.
Thank you for replying. Yes, @Phil_Seeman I used that “Set task as an approval task” integration rule but when the approval task is created, it is already approved. I want to set the task in a way that when it is created it is not approved. Can we do that?
What is the point of task approval automation when the task that is created is already approved? It will be really helpful if there is some way we can move tasks and turn them into unapproved tasks. I don’t know if I clearly explained it to you or not.
That’s not the Flowsana rule action marking it as approved (I just tested to be sure); you must have some other rule or automation that’s doing that.
Can you post a screenshot of the activity history for that task (from the bottom of the task’s detail pane)? Perhaps there’s a clue we can spot there as to what’s going on.
Yeah, sure.
You can see in the first image that as soon as the completed task moves to the waiting for approval section, it is set as mark as approval, but already approved.
Also, is it possible that when I move the task to the completed tasks section, a copy of the task moves to waiting for approval section, instead of the original task?
The reason for this is that the task is already marked as Complete when it’s moved into the Waiting For Approval section. By definition, Asana has a two-way mapping between “Approved” and “Completed” - it considers them one and the same. Meaning if a task is marked as “Approved”, it’s also set as “Completed”, and if it’s “Completed”, it’s also set as “Approved”. It’s the latter of those two equivalencies that’s happening in your case.
In order to get the behavior you want, you’d need to add a rule of:
When a task is moved to the Waiting For Approval section, mark task incomplete
That should get you the behavior you’re wanting.
There’s no way I know of to do that using native Asana, or Asana+Flowsana. It might be possible to do using another integration tool like Zapier, I’m not sure.
It’s a little bit of a workaround. But you could set up a field for status and have it be that once the status swaps to ready for approval, it moves to the new project, and automatically ads a new subtask that could be named Approval. You can have that assign to your manager automatically as well. It doesn’t change the entire task, but does add an approval step.
Glad it worked for you!
