Relatively new to Asana in practice, though my company has used it sporadically for a while.
I have determined that I can’t (yet) set a rule to create a new section, so in the meantime, I have created a Section with one Task (Task 1) in it.
I duplicate the section manually (and Task 1 along with it) each time I need to.
Task 1 has a custom Yes/No field.
I have set a rule that creates a New Task (Task 2) when Task 1 custom field is changed to Yes.
The problem:
I want Task 2 to appear within the section it’s trigger task is in. Currently it is appearing in a new unnamed section.
I could change Task 2 to a subtask in the rule, but I will be creating multiple levels and need to be able to reveal them all in list view, currently we can only open one layer of subtasks to view so that doesn’t help.
Am I missing something simple?
All of my forum searches revolved around more complex rule/trigger scenarios so I couldn’t quite find an answer.
Thanks
Jennifer
Hi @Zhana_Morris, thanks for reaching out and welcome to the Asana Forum!
As it stands, it’s not possible to create sections via rules. Could you share more details on why you need to duplicate the section with 1 task? Asana may offer an easier way to do it with, for example using Task Templates but it depends on what you would like to achieve 
Thank you for the response @Emily_Roman ,
So I am guessing that I will indeed turn this into a Task Template, and probably shouldn’t have bothered to include the details about not being able to create sections via rules as that may have confused things.
The main issue I am having is actually with how to get a rule to create a new task within the same section that the trigger task is in.
Just like when a rule creates a subtask, that subtask appears within the trigger task.
I don’t know that it is actually relevant to answer that specific question, but here is more detail about the project ultimately.
Basically this is in the style of an YES/NO flow chart where the Tasks could be read as “steps” in a process. Each Section represents an Event that gets contracted.
Event ABC (Section):
Task (Step 1): “Do we have the contract?”
NO: create Task 2 “Ask John to provide contract.”
YES: create Task 3 (Step 2) “Does contract require us to provide X service”
If we had to ask John for the info, once we have it, we change the No to Yes and move on to Step 2.
Task 3 (Step 2): “Does contract require us to provide X service?”
YES: create Task 4: “Book the service.” then move on to Task 5 (Step 3.)
NO: move directly on to Task 5 (Step 3.)
Task 5 (Step 3): “Does contract require us to provide Y service?”
YES: create Task 6: “Book the service.” then move on to Task 7 (Step 4.)
NO: move directly on to Task 7 (Step 4.)
and so it repeats.
I don’t want to use subtasks because “book the service” in my example above is actually made up of a bunch of steps itself. We can currently only un-collapse the first layer of subtasks and I need to visually see all the layers.
I also don’t want to create a new project for each contract but perhaps that is what I will have to do? Combining them into a portfolio.
Thanks for any insight!
Thanks for sharing the extra info, it’s very clear now @Zhana_Morris! Please find below some ideas:
Convert the process into a task template that include all steps in the subtasks section. This removes the work of updating fields to trigger rules and get new tasks created as everyone will always have visibility of all steps and action accordingly:
Please note you can add variable assignees and due dates to the task template to make sure work gets assigned to the right person in the right date.
I understand you want to have visibility to the work happening in the subtask in your main Project List view. To achieve this, you can set that the “Book services” subtask is automatically added to the project:
Example in a project:
If you still prefer to complete this work on stages, I would recommend creating one project per contract. Rules can move tasks to different sections as they progress and the custom fields change.
I hope this helps!
Thank you. I will play around with these variables. One element to this that I didn’t mention is that these are not necessarily assigned to a specific person, but rather, whoever has the time available to do it. My desire to have the steps visible within a Section is so a team member can easily see all the contracts that have still outstanding “book service” tasks and submit the bookings all together instead of having to go back and forth to see which project each “book service” task belongs to.
I think I can make that happen with your suggestion of moving the “book services” tasks to a new section as the parent section it originated from will be visible in the list.
Again,
Thank you.
