Include Sections when Search results are sorted by Project

Hi Marie,

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.

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Great catch @Allen_Chen! I’ve gone ahead and edited the thread’s title :slight_smile:

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.

6 Likes

Hi Marie,

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.

-Allen

4 Likes

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!

Hi,

I’m John, a product manager at Asana. There is a workaround for this that should work better in theory:

  1. For the sections that you expect to show up in a sort by project search results view, replace them with custom fields
  2. 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!

-John

1 Like

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 :frowning:

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)

Upload screenshots below:

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Hi @Vishal_Vyas, thanks for reporting this bug!

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 :slight_smile:

15th feb section : Log in - Asana

22nd feb section : Log in - Asana

@Emily_Roman Thanks for replying. Let me know if you need anything else from my side.

@Emily_Roman any update on this?

Hi @Vishal_Vyas :wave:t3:

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!

Hi John,

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.

Thanks,
-Allen

2 Likes

I appreciate the response! However, this doesn’t work well for us for a few reasons:

  • The print view still works as we would expect, so it creates yet another level of discontinuity for our team.
  • While sections do contain tasks, we really need them to behave as a section in the sense that it contains tasks and creates actual sections for them within projects. To be able to sort them in project view this way is wonderful, but to not be able to see that reflected in an organization or management-wide view of projects is frustrating and breaks what I believe is the intent for them. We use sections to separate phases (in a project), task types (in an office management type “project”), etc. Creating custom fields does not provide the appropriate level of separation, and creates a task that is now redundant, as we will still need to assign sections for future board-to-list functionality.

We are paying customers, but I would imagine anyone with a free version would not be satisfied with a custom field workaround for something that I feel is an intuitive use for sections (assuming custom fields are still a paid-only feature). Please consider changing this. I was so excited about the coming changes to sections until realizing this aspect was not considered a bug after all.

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Agree. If this is permanent, sections have become a redundant step to accommodate swapping to board view in the future at the expense of list view functionality.

2 Likes

Is there any plan to address this? We implemented Asana at my company about 8 months ago largely due to the functionality of being able to quickly develop a single organized report across multiple projects. This change breaks workflow for our entire company with seemingly zero benefit, which is a massive deterrent to continuing use of this tool

3 Likes

Briefly describe (1-2 sentences) the Bug you’re experiencing:

Steps to reproduce: i’m not sure how you name this feature. it’s a task with an":" at the end to structure projects. our problem is that we strongly depend on a project overview. therefore we created a meta project named “projectupdate” and tagged each task of each project with the tag"projectupdate. the problem is that you guys made an update in the last few days/weeks so the feature “Headline with : & underline” is only shown in projects but not the one based on tags…this is bad for us and we strongly depend on this feature! please let me know if this is a bug (which will be changed) or a feature (will stay as it is).

FYI, we’re premium customer

Browser version: any

Upload screenshots below:

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Hey @Niklas_Strohmeier, welcome to the Asana Community Forum!

Thank you for taking the time to share this with us, I have tested this on my end and was able to reproduce exactly what you are experiencing and showing in your screenshots.

I was also able to find an existing thread on the same topic in the #productfeedback category and have merged yours into it to allow other Forum members to easily find it and vote for it, I hope you don’t mind!

It’s true, in the print view it shows, haven’t noted it before.

I see this as a functionality drop, or bug, that also affects my main use of asana. In my case I need to filter tasks from a project, showing them ordered by sections, as they were manually put there.

To add to what others have said here, this is an issue for my team as well. @Marie this impacts every one of our projects. We use sections and we need to be able to search across projects and have sections display.

I don’t understand why the intended result of this change is to remove functionality that paying customers are using without providing an alternative.

The custom field workaround will not work for us as we have 75+ sections across our projects. Like others have said, you cannot filter a serach by a custom field and only the first few characters of the field are shown on a search. Not helpful. We need the ability to sort tasks in a search based on sections.

I continue to be frustrated by the suggestions that are shared on this forum that never get implemented. It only makes matters worse when features we rely on are taken away. These are your most engaged users and your team should listen to them.

5 Likes