Hi there,
I have been trying to setup a trigger in a projects tracker we have. The intention of the trigger is to update a task status field we have customized based on inactivity. So in simple terms, we want a trigger for the last modified field where if a project is not touched for 30 days it is automatically labelled as “Needs Attention”.
See screengrab of the last modified field below.
Hi @Mick_Higgins , welcome to the forum! Unfortunately, there is no trigger for that rule (or condition) natively in Asana. If you have technical people on your team, you could probably set this up using either a 3PP integrator (Make, Zapier, etc.) w/ webhooks or building that yourself (you’ll probably need a real web dev for the second option, or you can seek out one of the excellent partners in this forum to assist).
That said, what specific changes do you want to track, e.g., do you want to track when someone last updated a specific field, last comment, etc.? I believe that “last modified on” field will update any time a user or Asana publishes a change to a task, so if you have rules running (e.g., move tasks around sections in My Tasks based on due date), you might erroneously report that a task has been updated more recently than you want.
One potential solution: if these are projects and not tasks, you could use the native project status functionality (plus the automatic reminders) to have your team set statuses every week. It won’t be an automated process but does provide a structured approach for your broader desire.
If this is a must-have for your team, perhaps you could modify/move this post (or create a new one) in the Product Feedback channel so that other users can lend their support to your idea.
Welcome to the forum @Mick_Higgins - as @Stephen_Li has said this isnt a trigger currently available - I have moved your post to product feedback so that people can vote on the need for this and hopefully get it on the roadmap.
Don’t forget to vote yourself!!
Thanks Stephen and Becky, the information provided is helpful. I am going to explore a 3pp integrator option with our ops team.
I think the feature would be very helpful, so appreciate you adding it to product feedback @Becky_Manson . Could you provide me with a link to vote this feature up.
Thanks,
Mick
@Mick_Higgins - if you scroll up to the top of this thread, you’ll see there’s now a purple button to the left of the title!
I, too, was hoping to use “Last Modified On” metadata to serve monitoring purposes on several projects. It doesn’t appear usable in the new formulas, which would enable me to make formula fields using that date. I see this post (Last modified date changing when no changes have been made.), which indicates to me that the modified date may not be as useful as I had hoped until developers fix the issues causing it to be unreliable.
If there was some functionality in triggers to work off of INACTIVITY, that could open a whole lot of creativity and time saving. Stephen_Li asked,
I was hoping for a trigger that functions similarly to what’s available with Overdue as a trigger (When task is overdue, custom entry of 30 days, then …). When Last Modified is more than 1 week, 1 month, custom?, then… change a custom field, add a comment prompting assignee… any number of things.
To answer the question above while Last Modified On isn’t quite as meaningful as we’d hoped… perhaps tracking changes to comments (last comment date) would be the most useful in the interim? Would it be that challenging to create inactivity-based rules, though, allowing us to select our own custom field that hasn’t been changed in X number of days? The system could check at midnight for inactivity-based rules. I’m not a developer, though.
I understand that the current rule is a trigger that “if there is any change…”.
I think we need a trigger for the opposite rule.
The additional trigger would be when the “last modified date” (if there are no changes for a certain number of days…) “exceeds x number of days.”