Google Chat Integration Issue and workaround

[Jason_Fujinaka]

I did some testing over the weekend and found the following:

1. Asana sends the trigger too early sometimes, which causes the integration to fail intermittently. When creating a new task, Asana saves very often. I believe the trigger occurs without a task name which may be a required element for the integration to work. Even though you click new and start typing right away, seems about 30% of the time chat would not display the added task. Workaround: Create another project to generate the chat message. Create rules that makes sure that the task name is fully formed before multihoming it to the chat project.

2. Options are disregarded. Google chat creation options /asana_settings need to know the workspace, project, thread by project/task/none, and multi-select options of ‘Post Notifications to Google Chat for’
   -New task created
   -Completed tasks
   -Tasks assigned
   -New comments
   One of which needs to be selected. In my testing, selecting various combinations of the options seem to include all of the above, plus updates. I only wanted new task, but got assignee changes, comment/story changes, completion changes. Workaround: Try to create it and complete it before sending it to the project that will send it to chat to get the new task name sent to chat.

As this is an integration issue, I was hoping someone from the dev team could confirm that the format and message types are matching with what the integration is expecting. It’s almost like it’s in debug/send all mode.

3. I would love for the comments that get added to the task be sent to chat, but unfortunately it only sends a notice to chat with a link to asana to open the task and read the comments (this would likely require additional functionality from Google). Too many steps IMHO. Workaround (to be tested): Create a rule that when a comment is added, create a new task, complete it, update the name of the task to [Project Name] + [Comment], then multihome the task to the chat project.

4. It would be really cool if all chats could somehow know what project they were related to and thread by the ‘main’ project. I don’t believe my current implementation would allow that (more below)

**Current Implementation: **
Created a “GChat-Project Updates” PROJECT for updating the team on interdepartment project updates. No rules, no Apps, no Forms. Just a PROJECT that the integration will work with. Any tasks added here through multihoming will go to a specific Google Chat/Spaces called “Project Updates”

Created “GChat-PVM Outages” PROJECT like above. This will integrate with “PVM Outages” Google Chat/Spaces.

Created a Global Chat Field, Single-Select, “Project Updates” and “PVM Outages”

Every Project that will be using chat Projects will need to have these settings to be able to interact to chat properly. Added the above custom global field “Chat” to the project. Created RULE:

To use, set custom field “Chat” to “Project Updates” or “PVM Outages” and mark the task complete.

Potential Future Implementation:
I am considering moving the logic into a generic GChat group that will be able to process the task and it’s comments and multihome the resultant tasks to the appropriate Chat project for integration.

Has anyone done anything like this? Anyone else request these fixes? Any tips? Thanks!

[Joel_Delaney]

The /asana_settings ignoring all selected settings and sending updates for anything that happens in the Asana project is really frustrating. Can anyone from Asana explain where you are up to with resolving this issue?

[Tom_Rutledge]

Does Asana have an answer for this, love the idea of the functionality but getting blasted with to many updates to be useful. I only want to new when a new tasks is added and setup notifications as such but I get everything, as already stated by the author.