Dynamically Multi-home Tasks Based On Field Input

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Hello!

Amongst the many features Asana has and doesn’t has, one useful one that might be useful would be automatically multihoming a task to a project based on a form inputs (i.e. a link to a specific project).

Use case:
There is project A, B, and C. To kickoff the campaign, you need to submit a form. This initial form goes towards the creation of Project A - a core project for a given campaign where overarching timelines exist - kickoff dates, due dates for marketing, copywriting, coding, release dates, etc.

Project B and C are sub projects of Project A that run in parallel tandem. Project B holds all marketing tasks for project A, and Project C holds all coding tasks for project A. The reason its split out like this is that Project A can be huge, and adding all of Project B and C’s tasks to Project A would make the Asana project large and confusing. In addition, collecting all of the minutiae for everything in one form to kick off project A would make it extremely cumbersome.

Due to how expansive the project can be, how large the subprocesses themselves could be, and not all components being needed for each subsequent campaign (Marketing can be reused / Coding can be reused), the creation for project B and C would require their own forms to be submitted.

An ideal would be creating a field that would be “Asana URL”. That field would be populated in the form, and we could use the rule:

When…
“Task Is Added To This Project”

Check if…
“Task is added to this project by form…”

Do this…
“Add to an additional project”
with a 2nd dropdown with 2 options: “Choose a custom field” / “Choose a project”
The custom field could be a regular text field.

The automation would “Try” to add -
On error nothing would happen.

I think automation that allows static links to be created dynamically between projects are a good idea from a scalability standpoint.

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Hi @Peter_Louie,

Just to clarify…

The above can currently be automated via the rule you outline.

But…

Here, are you saying that instead of having the project to add to be “hard-coded” as it would have to be in the current rule implementation, you want to instead populate a text custom field with the name of a project that the task is to be added to, so that the additional project can be set dynamically so that it’s determined “at rule run time”. Is that correct?

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Hello! Thanks for the response. I definitely am using what currently can be done to show potential routes, limitations, and parameters.

Here, I understand having the name of the project would be a heavy lift given that projects can have the same name, rather populating a text custom field with a URL. Given the idea that users (both mine and others) could be both tech savvy and not, I believe a method with the URL as the crux would be key.

An alternate way of doing the same thing but cleaner with respect to UX/UI could be building parts within the form editor. Potential spitball idea of this below:

The first component being a “Project Lookup” component within the form, similar if not the same as the search dropdown for manual multihoming. Doing it this way would also allow it to be linked at task creation to a custom text field as it is a URL being input unless I’m mistaken, as well as opening this functionality up to other use cases.

The second component being a “Dynamic Multihome” within the “Settings” tab within the form editor under “Task Settings” that would allow you to choose a “Project Lookup” field.

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