Hi all,
After receiving various requests, we made some exciting enhancements to Flowsana this past weekend!
Special Handling of Subtasks (it’s back!)
Normally, the Auto-Adjust workflow type shifts dependent tasks; that is, when you change the Due Date of a task, the Start and Due Dates of all of its dependents are shifted by the same amount of time. This behavior can be applied to subtasks exactly the same as it is for top-level tasks. To include subtasks in this way, be sure to select Both top-level tasks and subtasks in your Apply this workflow to selection.
Alternately, when setting up an Auto-Adjust Workflow for a project, you now have the option of choosing Treat subtasks as dependent tasks of their parent. This option (which used to be available but was removed at one point, but now is back) is useful when you want all subtasks in your project to act like dependents of their parent task. If you enable it, then instead of having to explicitly and manually mark all subtasks as dependents of their parent, Flowsana will treat all subtasks as if you had marked them as dependent on their parent. That is, if you change the start/due date of a task in the project and that task has subtasks, then the start and due dates of all of those subtasks will be shifted the same number of days that you moved their parent task.
Note: If you select this Treat subtasks as dependent tasks of their parent option, the Apply this workflow to drop-down selection is no longer shown as it’s not relevant when using this option.
Variable Substitution Updates
Variable substitution has been around for a long time. We have added some new options for you!
{task.Description} and {task.HTMLDescription}
These give you access to the Description field of the current task being evaluated.
The only difference is that {task.HTMLDescription} provides the fully formatted description. When using the Description for external destinations like an email notification, use {task.Description} as email clients will not properly understand or interpret Asana’s subset of HTML which it uses for its Description field. When using the Description to copy it from one task to another within Asana, like populating a subtask’s Description from its parent task, you can use the fully formatted version; in this example you would use {parent.HTMLDescription}.
{task.Link} and {task.LinkInProject}
Using these variables, you can include a full link to the triggering Asana task.
{task.Link} provides a regular long hyperlink to the task, displayed full-screen. By contrast, {task.LinkInProject} provides a hyperlink that displays the task’s detail pane in the context of the list view of its project.
(Note that also have {task.ShortLink} which creates a much-shoter and more compact link to the task.)
New Rule Action: Add Tasks…
This new action lets you automatically add tasks from a template of pre-built tasks. It is very similar to the existing Add subtasks… action. In fact, all of the Add subtasks… documentation applies to this new Add tasks… action as well. The only difference is that instead of letting you add subtasks below the task that triggered the rule, this action lets you add top-level tasks immediately following (i.e. below) the task that triggered the rule.
This rule action means that now you can build more dynamic projects, where steps can be added to a project based on conditions as they occur throughout the use of the project!
Note that the template subtasks can themselves have subtasks below them, and these will become subtasks in the destination project.