Briefly describe (1-2 sentences) the Bug you’re experiencing:
Sections no longer appear in search results when sorting by project. They were there a couple weeks ago…
Steps to reproduce:
Perform an advanced search such that it returns multiple tasks that belong to different sections.
Change the sort to Project.
Notice that tasks are grouped by Project, but the section headings no longer show up within those projects. Now there is just a single, giant list of tasks within each project.
Browser version:
Google Chrome Version 72.0.3626.109 (Official Build) (64-bit)
Sections used to be just like tasks in our backend which explains why they were returned in Advanced Search results, but they have now their own model which could explain why they aren’t showing up in the Advanced Search anymore.
Let me check this with our Development Team and I’ll be in touch with more info!
Briefly describe (1-2 sentences) the Bug you’re experiencing:
The milestone functionality release seems to have broken section functionality. The sections still display in the primary list, but do not display properly anymore in search. Sections are still selectable from the project dropdown in the single task view.
Steps to reproduce:
Create a search on a project with sections. Sort by project. You should see that it no longer sorts into sections.
Browser version:
Google Chrome 72.0.3626.109
Upload screenshots below:
Screenshots won’t really help illustrate the problem without context.
Just dropping in to say we have the same issue, and it’s causing problems in our workflow.
We have a Project for… well… each Project in our firm. We then use sections to sort these projects by phase. We use a search report as our Agenda for staff meetings, and without these section headers it gets quite hard to organize. They do not show at all. What’s interesting, is that if you print that search, they show as expected. Please bring section functionality back to searches.
One of my coworkers was able to get the section headers to display in searches by assigning those sections to himself, however that has not worked for me.
Thank you both for reporting this issue! I’m looking into this for you and will be in touch as soon as possible. We already have an existing thread on this topic, so I’ve gone ahead and merged this thread with the existing one!
Quick update on this topic, our Development Team has confirmed that this is not a bug but an intended behavior following recent changes made to sections. I’ve gone ahead and moved this thread to the #productfeedback category to allow all of you to comment and submit your vote. I’ve also slightly edited the title to make this thread more discoverable to other users
Thanks for the update. This is very disappointing news. This basically breaks the workflow that my team and I use in Asana. Are there any workarounds for this problem? Can we opt to go back to the old system?
Also, regarding the title, we specifically need sections to appear when sorting by Project. Although, an option to show them when sorting by Assignee might be useful too.
Great catch @Allen_Chen! I’ve gone ahead and edited the thread’s title
Unfortunately, I don’t have a good workaround to give you right now, but I’ve gone ahead and escalated your feedback straight to the Team in charge of this project. Could you by any chance let me know how many of your projects are disrupted by this issue? That would be super helpful to understand the impact this is having on our customers.
Again, so sorry for the trouble and thanks for your cooperation!
Why break a feature that people use and not provide an alternative? I get if they want to change the way something works to make it better, but they’ve repeatedly shown they don’t seem to care about that or their customers. As I’ve mentioned in another thread, this is a terrible way to treat paying customers. If you’re going to release changes that will break established workflows, at least provide versioning for customers that pay for the tool. Or, you know, actually listen to your customers’ feedback?
Due to this and other changes — and more importantly, the way you treat your customers — Asana will remain forever in my mind a terrible tool for business. You already lost my company’s business due to this behavior (just a couple more months until we start migrating away from this), but you’re leaning more and more toward losing my personal business as well.
Also, I sincerely doubt any voting for this feature here will work. Your dev team has already established that they don’t care about fixing features they’ve intentionally broken.
I primarily work on one project right now, so I suppose the answer to your question is “one” but that is not a good measure of the impact. That project is very large and has tasks in lots of sections running in parallel. We use saved searches to create custom views, which are our main way of interacting with the project. Being able to see the sections in those views is critical. Not displaying them completely negates the point of having sections in the first place.
Thanks for the additional information @Allen_Chen, really appreciate it! I’ve gone ahead and escalated your feedback directly our support team and will make sure to loop you in as soon as I have more info on this topic. Again, may sincere apologies for the trouble here, and thank you so much for sharing this insightful feedback with us!
I’m John, a product manager at Asana. There is a workaround for this that should work better in theory:
For the sections that you expect to show up in a sort by project search results view, replace them with custom fields
When typing your search criteria, add the custom field as an additional filter (don’t select the option value)
The view would now return the search results along with the custom fields that represent your old section value as an additional column on the list. Please let us know if this solves your problem or if you have more feedback!
Tasks that were marked as sections appear as normal task i.e. font is not bold & font size is same as normal or regular task.
Currently sections only work at project level
Steps to reproduce:
Click on tag to filter task by selected tag
Sections appear as normal task
Browser version:
Version 72.0.3626.119 (Official Build) (64-bit)
Let’s look into this together, it looks that the sections are the tasks “22nd Feb” and “15th Feb” that appear in your list. Could you please send me the URL of these tasks? This would help me to investigate this further, looking forward to your reply
Marie here, stepping in for Emily! Thank you so much for providing us with more information. Other people have actually reported the same issue, and after investigating with our Development Team, it appears that this linked to changes we have recently made to Sections, you can learn more about this in Include Sections when Search results are sorted by Project - #6 by Marie. With that said, our Pm John just provided a workaround that you might find useful; you can find it here. On my end, I’ve gone ahead and merged your post with the main thread to gather all feedback in one place; hope you don’t mind!
I just tried this out using a drop-down style custom field and see a few problems with this:
Now you would have to manually and redundantly set a custom field to match the section that a task is in
I don’t see a way to sort the search results by the custom field, so the search results are jumbled
The custom field in the search results is too narrow, so it only shows the first three or four characters of the custom field value
So, I’m afraid that solution just isn’t going to work for us. I still must emphatically request that you add the section name display back to the search results.
