Is anyone else experiencing issues with rules writing into private custom fields? When I use a rule to change the private custom field - it works only as long as it’s applied to the same task. If I try to create a new task or subtask with any value (dynamic or static) in the private custom field it comes up blank.
It also doesn’t seem to be an issue with reading the value from the trigger task, as you can write the value into non-private fields in a new task (like the task title).
I’ve submitted a support request in case it’s a bug - but was hoping the excellent community might be able to provide some insight!
Any update on this? @Aerro-GH, I’m curious how Asana ultimately handled your support case. I found this post from 5 days ago marked as “product feedback” and I am the sole vote. In my opinion, this is a critical bug. I ran into this today, which led me to this forum post. I made an existing field private. It was only used to drive backend automations and I wished to simply hide it from cluttering the views of others. In our scenario, we’re seeing both:
Tasks created by rules do not inherit private custom field from parent task (dynamic)
Tasks created by rules do not gain the specific private custom field selected within the rule (static)
No alert was provided in the rule that anything was broken and needed to be fixed.
We made a handful of fields private on Friday and discovered on Monday the functionality around this was not working as expected. We’ve rolled back the field visibility to stop disrupting our workflow until we can create a workaround or hear this will be addressed by Asana.
Thanks, @Elizabeth_Lumsden. I had missed this post when I went looking for one to add mine to. I’m currently working with Support to see if there’s anything that can be done, and will report back here with any results.
@Elizabeth_Lumsden I just heard back from support. Private fields cannot inherit because the inheritance function is dependent on the Guest role having user access.
This makes no sense to me. We have already tested that restricted fields can still be utilized in task templates. With task templates, users who don’t have permission to edit a field choice are still allowed to use the task template and the task will be populated with the field choice that cannot be edited. I just tested this with private fields and see that a task template with a private field preset by the template will work properly for those with explicit permission for that field, but will generate a task with the private field empty if the task template is used by someone without permission to access that private field. This, and the limitation they have explained to you in rule-created tasks, make private fields far less useful for our workflows at the moment. It leaves us having to build in extra automation and inventing triggers to populate something we would prefer to be populated privately from the beginning. Maybe someday. Thanks again for sharing your update. It’s helpful to hear the root issue being pointed to. Perhaps task creation through rules depends on Asana guest access to execute the rule? I’m scratching my head.
From an Asana reply to Leigh_Flynn (shared in this thread), it appears this is not considered a critical bug. It feels buggy to me, still, but thought I’d point it out.
We have already tested that