I’m experiencing a new problem in a project I’ve been using for years, and I’m wondering if I’m experiencing some sort of bug. It’s also possible I’m missing an obvious solution/answer, but I’d like some help!
For context: I manage marketing material production and use one project—creatively titled Marketing Materials—to house all these materials. Each material appears in the form of a task. Sometimes these task are created in Marketing Materials, and then added to additional projects. Other times, they originate in another project and are then added to mine.
Historically, when accessing these tasks from Marketing Materials, I always saw the fields in my preferred order. However, today I started noticing that tasks were showing fields in a different order. This is happening to tasks created in another project, and to tasks created in Marketing Materials. In the case of the latter, the fields get out of order as soon as I add them to another project, adopting that project’s field order as the default.
Because this is a very new issue, I’m assuming it’s a bug that can hopefully be fixed. Help welcomed!
Hello @Janna_Gosling - Are your custom fields reordered in the customize menu? I wasn’t able to replicate the issue you are having with the adopting the projects field order, unless I am specifically in that 2nd project where I multi-homed the original task.
@Alex_Christensen No, when I view the customize menu (from my project), the fields are still in the correct order, but they aren’t showing that way in the actual task, even if I’m accessing it from my project.
Based on extensive testing, the order can’t be controlled or changed. It is driven by the options/customize menu of a project, but when multi-homing is going on, you can’t change the order.
It still helps if you reorder fields in all multi-homed projects (although I agree it can be erratic behaviour)
For example if Field A is sorted as the first field in the Customize>Fields menu in all multi-homed projects, then it will appear as the first field in the task details pane.
+1 to this issue. There isnt a way to see/order ALL of the fields for the task across multi-homed tasks in Asana (until you export to CSV). From what we tested, it seems to correspond to what date the field was added to the library.
I also may add the list of fields in the task view stops at 60, even though there is up to 100 total fields. So even a single-homed task, if you created custom field #61 and need to go fill it in for certain tasks, you can only do that in the list view/you’ll never see it in the task pane unless you move the order which in turns screws up existing reporting
Thank you everyone for sharing your feedback! Garrett here, a Group PM Lead who owns our core project management functionality. In part due to @Bastien_Siebman ‘s evangelism here, we are working on improving this experience. Here is what we are looking to improve in our next half:
Stop limiting custom fields on the task pane to 60, and instead allow you to see all custom fields applicable to the task across all multi-homed projects.
Group custom fields on the task pane by project, ensuring you have context on where the field lives. This is particularly advantageous when you have fields that aren’t global that sound the same (i.e. Priority, Status etc)
Albeit still in design, we are exploring ways to help improve discoverability of custom fields on the task pane - especially in the event a task is multi-homed and has hundreds or even thousands of fields
This sounds exciting! I’m curious to see how it changes the task panel without making it feel cluttered. Definitely a needed improvement, but I can see the challenge ahead
@Esteban_Giannini 100%. We have our best designers on it to solve this holistically. We’ll definitely be looking for all of your feedback soon though to ensure where we land is meeting you all’s needs!
We have several projects with a long list of custom fields to accommodate different task types, in addition to a sizable set of My Tasks custom fields. This makes the detail pane feel cluttered and harder to scan for relevant information. It would be very helpful to have a project-level setting that allows empty fields to be hidden and/or My Tasks fields to be collapsed in the detail pane. This would make retrieving information from the detail pane much easier.
@Jeremy_Long, I’m pretty sure that @Garrett_Knoll marked another topic considered or in development related to this (it was broader, but this was part of a solution envisioned, so maybe you could merge with that?
@Jeremy_Long we’re actively working on addressing the pain points you mentioned! It’s in design now so it’s marked as “considered”, but it’s a commit across multiple teams for our current half.
