Introducing Text Field Triggers and Conditions!

[Nadeen_Saleh]

Hi Asana Community!

I’m thrilled to announce a powerful new addition to Asana’s automation capabilities: Text Field Triggers and Conditions! This duo unlocks entirely new workflows by letting your rules respond to changes in text fields.

What are Text Field Triggers?

Text Field Triggers are a new type of rule trigger that fire when text is changed in key fields. Your rules can now automatically respond when:

1. Task Name is changed
2. Task Description is changed
3. Text Custom Fields are changed

What are Text Field Conditions?

To complement the new triggers, we’re also launching powerful text-based conditions. These let you fine-tune exactly when your rules should take action using the following operators:

1. Contains / Does not contain specific keywords
2. Starts with / Ends with certain characters
3. Equals / Not equals an exact string
4. Is empty / Is not empty - perfect for auditing missing data

And here’s where it gets really powerful: you’re not limited to comparing fields against static text. You can compare a text field against any other existing text field (e.g., “if Task Name matches Text Custom Field A”).

Who is this for?

This feature is available to all customers with access to rules.

Let us know if you have any questions or feedback!

[neonrain.club]

Ooooo this is a game changer!

[Richard_Sather]

Very exciting! Great to see so many developments lately for Rules

[Esteban_Giannini]

Awesome improvement! Great job Asana team!

[lpb]

This is really helpful, @Nadeen_Saleh, and nice to see it so comprehensively addressed; I can see using all of those permutations of rules for one thing or another!

Thanks,

Larry

[Cyril-iDO]

Great news, will this also be available in the portfolio rules?

[Tetsuo_Kawakami]

That’s great!
And one more thing, I want a regular expression match.

[Richard_Sather]

@Nadeen_Saleh

Equals / Not equals an exact string

It looks like we will get ‘exact match’, @Tetsuo_Kawakami

[Tetsuo_Kawakami]

@Richard_Sather

exact match

@Richard_Sather
thanks for your comment.
I meant regex or regexp for ‘regular expression’ such as ’[a-z]+'.

[Tracy_Hopewell1]

I am SO grateful for this change! Thank you, Asana team!!!

[Jason_Fujinaka]

Finally! I can fix a bunch of things that I wasn’t willing to convert to a multiple choice!!

[Paul_Ulman]

This is going to be very useful! I really like how you can make this text specific. game changer.

[Rithana_Srikanth]

I’ve been WAITING for this one - game changer! Thank you!!

[Olesia_Chegodaeva]

It turns out that the rule will only work if this is a new task. If this is multihoming or a task created using a form with a ready-made description, then the rules will not work, since the description or title does not change. Yes?

[lpb]

@Olesia_Chegodaeva,

You’re correct that a new task from a form or multi-homing a task won’t trigger the rule (because technically the field was not changed).

But it doesn’t have to be a new task; the rule works with existing tasks if the field is changed.

Thanks,

Larry

[Jan-Rienk]

This is a-ma-zing @Nadeen_Saleh ! Love it!

I would have asked it’d be followed up with Text functions like concatenate and join in Rules but I’m thinking likely all of this is already possible with variables.

[Richard_Sather]

Indeed an amazing feature! The possibilities are endless - for one, we can finally have a native way to assign tasks, from incoming forwarded emails to projects, based on the contents of the subject (task name) or description. I’m drafting a forum tip.. stay tuned!

[Nate_Bartlett]

I love this! I used it last week before seeing this announcement, and it was easy to use! Thank you!

[Richard_Sather]

As promised.. here’s a nifty use case for these new rule triggers and conditions:

Automatically triage emails into tasks, based on the content of the email

The recently launched text field triggers and conditions in rules open more possibilities than ever before, with the ability to trigger rules (and check their conditions) based on the contents of the task name, its description or text fields! So I thought this could be useful for Asana projects that are setup up as ‘buckets’ to capture emails that are forwarded directly to Asana and converted into tasks. Then based on the subject or the body of the email, you could setup rules to automatically …

[ka_nishiyama]

Can I use multiple keywords in a Custom Value?
Meaning: “Contains any of the keywords”
Example: “Apple”, “Orange”, “Banana”, “Pineapple”