Novice - Trying to conceptualize a project

Hey all -

I have been looking into the API Documentation and have began looking deeper into how to use it to my company’s advantage, mostly to try and solve problems that are deeper than the simple Asana Premium rules and features.

I’m simply learning on the fly and also sharpening my python skills to keep up to speed.

The problem in question: if a task is in X column for longer than [a certain period of time] - notify someone in my team via Inbox, e-mail, etc.

I can break down my problem into some pretty baseline API requests, but I’m looking to chat with anybody who has any advice to offer about pulling that kind of problem off logically. It seems doable with the API tools as they are, but like I said, I am a novice and still need a little help learning at this point.

Thanks for any of all help.

Hi,

Don’t hesitate to have the chat here :slight_smile:
What I would do in your case is something like a cron that would trigger a script, reading a specific project, storing outside of Asana for each task the column it is in + the current time; and then you can have a pretty basic interface telling you how long a task stayed in each column. :man_shrugging:

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Appreciate the response.

I’m doing some research into crons - do you have any good links, references, case studies, etc regarding this kind of procedure?

Can you put your hands on a server of some kind online? I know there are some online services that can also do polling. @lpb we need your knowledge here!

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Hi @anon37105624 and thanks @Bastien_Siebman,

The library I used before is not officially released and seems not to be maintained so I can’t recommend that and don’t have specific experience with crons.

www.glitch.com is a pretty fun environment with freemium where you could prototype and even potentially use.

Using the Asana library for your chosen language is a good start.

Others may know better (@Phil_Seeman?) but in this case you may have a choice to a) try to use Stories which reflect an imperfect audit trail of task updates, or b) just cache that info yourself. I think from what I’ve read doing it yourself may be simpler in the end.

Larry

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Hi @anon37105624,

I’m with Larry, I would not use Stories as they’re not going to guarantee you completely accurate data. I also like his idea of using glitch.com; if you google “running a cron job on glitch.com” you’ll see that it’s definitely possible and there are some resources available to help.

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Appreciate the responses all -

I’m going to do some further research and bump this thread with some more specific questions.

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