File attached to recurring task has replicated itself umpteen times in the My Tasks Files list - any way to clean this up?

I had an image file attached to one instance of a recurring task in the “Panda” Project - thinking the file would be attached simply to that task instance, back on May 22 or whenever.

Today, I have opened up the My Tasks list of the Panda project and find that the May 22 file has been replicated umpteen times. I deleted the image file from the current occurrence of the Task, but of course all the endless duplications remain there.

Is there any way for me to delete all these useless duplications? They are clogging up the My Tasks Files list to make it useless. Thank you!

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Hi @Stephanie_Oberg and thanks for the report!

I believe this is an expected behaviour, but I definitely understand that it’s not ideal from a Files Tab point of view. I rarely open this tab as part of my workflows, but I just took a look at mine there and it is pretty cluttered :sweat_smile: I think that keeping attachments on a recurring task can be very useful if they’re report for example. In my case, I’ve have a weekly reporting tasks where I attach CSVs, and I find it easier to have all my CSVs available on one task at the end of the month, rather than searching and downloading attachments from 4 different tasks. But again, that’s a specific example, and I’m sure it doesn’t suit everyone. Being able to filter or to sort attachments within the Files tab could be a potential compromise? I wasn’t able to identify any other reports in the Forum, so I guess not many people use this view, but I’ve escalated a task to our team to consider for a future update.

In the meantime, I genuinely don’t have an efficient solution to remove these attachments… all I can think of is to run an Advanced Search with the exact title of the task, you as the assignee and the filter “has attachments”, and to manually delete attachments in each tasks. It’s seems that you could also use the API (Build an app with Asana), @Phil_Seeman @lpb @Bastien_Siebman might be able to tell us more about this?

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It should be possible to delete them via the API, I agree; alas I personally haven’t done any API work with attachments so I don’t have any particular code you could use.

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Neither have I…

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Thanks Marie, that actually worked fine. There were a lot fewer instances of the task than I thought and deleting the attachments 1 by 1 was doable. I appreciate the help.

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