Would love to hear if anyone has a better idea than this 
I am syncing info from QBO and Eventbrite into my CRM project in Asana using zapier - adding a subtask to the master contact record. The challenge has been how to have a master key record to search or - such as an email address - to locate the correct record.
One option would be to have the task name be the email address but this looks annoying (even with custom fields displaying the name).
So I came up with this idea - to have a google sheet with a list of email addresses and task names and zapier searches the sheet by email and then inputs the task name into the asana search.
Until Asana lets you search by custom field I think this is the best option.
Any thoughts?
Hi @Yossi_Goldblatt! Thanks for reaching out. Sounds like an interesting process you’re setting up. One thought I have is to add the Task ID to the Google sheet (or another part of the process). The Task ID can be found in the the task URL like so:
When you search for the Task ID in Asana search, the task will appear.
@paulminors and @Todd_Cavanaugh will likely have suggestions, as well.
Right - the only issue is that when adding a subtask using zapier it uses
the task name as the key not the task id.
Ah, I see. I’m going to add this thread to our Integrations category, as I believe some of our developer friends and integration experts will have helpful insights! @Matt_Bramlage and @Sara may have brilliant ideas, as well.
Can you use the person’s name in the task field?
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No b/c I am syncing from systems like QBO and Eventbrite which use the
email address for the unique key. Legal names can differ from the ones used
in regular conversation and my CRM database is not always 100% accurate.
The Asana search is pretty good in matching similar names but not really
good enough…
In that case, it sounds like you’d need to use the email address. However, you could add a step to the zap to update the task name after the zap has run so you’re not leaving the task name as an email. Would this work?
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The way I have it now I don’t need to do that - I can keep a google sheet
of task names, email addresses and ID’s and use Zapier to look up the task
name based on the email address. This avoids the problem but is somewhat
clumsy and will be a little hard to keep current.
Ideally Zapier would be able to search by custom field instead of task
name. I’m sure that functionality is coming at some point.
Alternatively, giving more formatting options to present the custom fields
in a bigger bolder font in the list view.
Hi @Yossi_Goldblatt,
I think that zapier use the typeahead search to Asana API and this endpoint return results only with queries contained in the task name. I tried with an email in the task description but it didn’t work.
At your case, because I don’t like to keep multiple referral materials like sheets, I would use a master contact record with task name like FirstName LastName [email@example.com] so the task would be matched by zapier.
Hope this helped,
D.
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This is what I would suggest as well. We have some ideas on the API team about better search functionality for our API, such that you can search by (among other things) custom fields, but that’s not available yet, unfortunately.
I would recommend what @Diakoptis suggests, or an alternative if you happen to be a paid user of Zapier. It’s ever-so-slightly cleaner if you keep the mapping inside of Asana, also as @Diakoptis suggests, because it’s one less thing you have to navigate between (so you don’t have to have your CRM, Sheets, and Asana all open or in the front of your mind).
This would look like creating a project in Asana that has the email in the name, so Zapier can find it, and the ID of the parent task (the one you want to add a subtask to) in the notes. This is an intermediate “Find task in Project” step just after the Zapier trigger. You can then use the value of the notes field from this step as a custom value in the “Create Subtask” step to look up the parent task by ID.
Again, though, this is basically what you’re doing in sheets, but simply moving it into Asana, so your flow might not be hugely improved by it. I’ll let our API team know that this is a vote for adding searching by custom fields, though, so thanks for the feedback!
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