How can I extract details of values of a multi-select field as a variable in a rule?

English Forum Ask the Community
,
1

I have an Asana project that includes a multi-select custom field that selects people. I’m trying to use the values from that field as a variable in an automation rule. Specifically, I have a “do this” step that sends a message to Teams, and I’d like to include the email addresses of the people selected. Unlike the “assignee” field where I have a sub-selection choice of name, email, or ID, this custom field doesn’t offer any sub-selection. Even worse, when I include the variable in the message, I just get a bunch of URLs (that appear to point to each person’s profile). Is there any solution here?

2

@JW_E3,

A multi-select field doesn’t have “details” so for your very specific question, you could

  • use the email addresses as the option values (instead of names), or
  • user “Otherwise if” conditions in your rule, one for each name for which you need to assign an email value, and hardcode those in your rule.

You could consider AI Studio for this perhaps.

Or if you’re on Enterprise you could code this with Script Actions.

Thanks,

Larry

3

Thanks for the quick response, Larry.

Unfortunately, neither of those first two options is ideal. If we used email addresses then people filling in the tasks would need to know (find/copy) each person’s email address and that’s a lot of extra work when Asana already has a great People type that populates with everyone on the team. Doing an “Otherwise if” in this case is a non-started because there are 100+ people that could be selected.

I did notice that we have Script Actions, so I’ll look more into that. Do you know if scripts will give me actions to the email addresses of the people in the list? Or would it just get the URLs that the current rule gets?

4

It sounds like your custom field is a “people” type custom field. (My initial reading was that you were using a multi-select type custom field.)

Yes, in the Script Action you can retrieve the gid of the user and then use https://app.asana.com/api/1.0/users/{gid} to retrieve that user’s email address.

5

Ah, yes, it’s a People field. My mistake. I thought it was multi-select because you can select multiple people (versus the assignee where you can only select one), but I see that it’s a People type and I suppose People fields are always multi-select.

I assume your original answer still stands that you can’t get the details directly in an Asana rules variable?

6

Yes, that’s right, I’m afraid.

It would be great if you’d search the English Forum > Product Feedback in case a request for those Variable options for people fields were offered and then youl could vote there, otherwise, create a new request there (and vote!).

Thanks,

Larry

7

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.