Events for Sections

English Forum Developers & API
1

Hi Asana API team,

In line with the newer way that sections are being done programmatically, I was wondering if you have any plans to add Events on Section changes, or what your thinking is in this regard?

2

Hmm, I don’t think we have plans at the moment to add sections as one of the things you could subscribe to for events. I suppose that it sort of makes sense, but for now I think the only workaround would be to get events for the whole project and ignore the ones that aren’t scoped to a section. Part of the reason that I think we’d hold off on this is because sections are still :frowning_face: implemented differently in board view vs. list view, even though this is something we’ve wanted to fix for quite some time (which is why we don’t make the distinction in our API interface). I think perhaps in the happy day when we do move over the older-style list sections to match the newer-style board sections this might become something we consider.

1 Like
3

But that approach wouldn’t allow me to know when, for example, a user moved a section within a board-view project, would it?

Oh, interesting - truthfully I haven’t tried this, but are you saying if I did this call in a list-view project:
GET /projects/project-id/sections
that it wouldn’t correctly return me the sections (i.e. the tasks which end in a “:” ?

4

Yeah, we don’t record events for when board sections move around. We may have better/richer/more clear event handling in the future, I hope the near future, but all of our events right now are basically on the task level (even if the events bubble up to the project so you can ask for “all events”)

if I did this call in a list-view project:
GET /projects/project-id/sections

That should return the correct sections, but that’s because we made sure that this endpoint is implemented both as task sections (which are in fact implemented as tasks with a colon which get additional data/indexes) and board columns (a distinct container datatype). This is most apparent in our API from product decisions, such as it’s not possible to have tasks in “no section” in board views, but it is possible in list views.

5

Thanks for the explanation - that helps to understand how things are currently architected. It sounds like it’s a “when” not an “if” that you’ll be updating list view sections so that they exist as the distinct Section datatype. We’ll just have to be a little patient while that happens!

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6

@Joe_Trollo, @Matt_Bramlage,

Whoa - my Flowsana event processing generated an exception yesterday because it received an unknown event type - a Section Changed event! This is exciting - well, not the exception but the underlying point - it looks like you’re now sending Section events! :partying_face: :clap:t3:

Guess you’ll need to add this to your documentation-change list for the Events API page… :slight_smile:

7

I did just notice, though, that when I deleted a section, I got a Section Changed event instead of the expected Section Deleted event. Thoughts on that?