Dependencies in Templates Not Working

Hello!
With the new rollout of the updated templates feature, my team and I lost the ability to add dependencies into our templates. Recently, the feature was added back in, but it is not working. When I go into edit a template, I have the option to add dependencies to the task, but nothing will populate and it tells me “no matches found in this template.” Does anyone know a solution to this or have a timeline on when this feature will be fixed? My team and I rely heavily on the templates feature, as well as adding dependencies into the templates. With the loss of this feature, our efficiency to start projects has seriously slowed!

Hi @Maggie_Sartin, thanks for reaching out :slight_smile:

I’m not able to reproduce this on my end, I can add dependencies in project templates with no issue.

Are you copying and pasting a task’s URL to add the dependency and getting no results, or searching by name?

Looking forward to hearing back from you :slight_smile:

Hey Rebecca! Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. I am searching the task by name and I also tried copying and pasting the task URL. Neither worked. I have attached a picture of what comes up when I try to add dependencies. Other people on my team are having this issue as well.

Yeah we saw the same thing with @Julien_RENAUD the other day. Here’s the workaround (until @Rebecca_McGrath answers) → create a regular task with the dependency, then use the 3 dots menu to turn the task into a template. You’ll see that the dependency will be there!

Yes I confirm I have exactly the sale issue as @Maggie_Sartin

Hi @Maggie_Sartin, @Bastien_Siebman and @Bastien_Siebman - are you still running into this issue? If so, I’ll escalate it to our Product team.

Hi Rebecca! I am still running into this issue, along with several members of my team! We would very much appreciate it if you passed this along to your Product team. Thank you!

Thanks for confirming, @Maggie_Sartin. I’ve gone ahead and escalated this - I’ll let you know as soon as I have an update :slight_smile:

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Hi @Maggie_Sartin, thanks for your patience here. Our Product team have taken a look at the screenshot and have noticed that there are no subtasks in your template. With templates, you can only make dependencies on subtasks within that task template.

So, this is expected behaviour. I hope this clarifies!

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Hi @Rebecca_McGrath! Is there a reason that dependencies aren’t available in a project template anymore? I understand the purpose of task templates, but in the past our team used project templates to get the majority of our work done. A lot of our projects reoccur on a monthly basis, so in the past we would choose the option to “save as template” to keep the project’s task deadlines and dependencies intact. This would allow us to open our monthly projects quickly and efficiently. See attached screenshot of a template I’d created prior to the roll-out of the new templates feature. You can see the dependencies.

Ever since the new project templates feature rolled out, whenever you save a project as a template, you lose all the task dependencies. At this point, it’s a less manual process to just duplicate the project and bypass the templates feature altogether.

What’s the intention of the templates feature if you’re not able to use all the elements that you would use in a typical project?

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I agree with Kelsey! My team has strayed away from using the template feature and now duplicates projects in order to keep dependencies. At most, I wish I was able to convert my template feature back to the original version just to have the dependencies back.

The new template rollout was exciting and had lots of features that I was looking forward to using but, the inability to use dependencies has made me stop using templates altogether. I miss this Asana feature!

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That’s a dramatic update if what you are describing @Kelsey_Browne is true. @Rebecca_McGrath please share a thread where we can discuss this topic!

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Careful here, folks, I think this thread has veered onto a completely separate topic.

Everything up until @Rebecca_McGrath’s “expected behavior” post is about task templates.

The next post from @Kelsey_Browne is, if I’m not mistaken, discussing an upcoming update to project templates which has not been released yet but I think is available in a beta form to some customers.

I believe it is indeed the case that those don’t currently support dependencies but it’s not yet released so might change, and anyway I’m going to stop talking about it since it’s not released and I don’t want to violate my Asana NDA. :slight_smile:

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Hey everyone! Definitely didn’t mean to cause any confusion. I do think my team installed the Project Templates Beta feature and based on @Maggie_Sartin’s initial post that’s what I think this thread has been referencing since she mentions “the new rollout of the updated templates feature.” I was joining the conversation because I was experiencing the same issues, but I apologize if I misunderstood.

Is there any way to disable the beta feature of Project Templates? If it’s subject to change and it’s not currently working for our team, I’d like to use the original version but I don’t know how to revert back.

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Hey all! I’m John, the tech lead at Asana responsible for our templates work. I just wanted to clear up the confusion here:

Task template dependencies - when you define a template you can only define dependencies between things that are created by that template. Our reasoning here was that it didn’t make sense to be able to mark a task template as dependent on an actual task in Asana, as once you complete that actual task your template would be created with a dependency that had already been resolved. If you have a usecase that requires you to define task templates that are dependent on existing Asana tasks we’d love to hear that feedback.

Project Templates dependencies - we are continually working to improve Asana’s template features. I can confirm that defining dependencies between tasks in project templates is a core usecase, and that we will continue fully supporting that as we make other improvements to project templates. Occasionally we will run opt in beta tests of new features under active development to get feedback, and those beta versions will sometimes be missing features that will be present at launch due to development timelines. I’ll have someone from the team running the beta follow up with you on specifics of your situation.

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Hey @anon12228830! Thank you for your response! I appreciate hearing back from you. Hopefully, we can get this situation fixed!

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