Now launched: an advanced task search API! 🔎

English Forum Developers & API
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Hello developers, we have an exciting announcement to make: the Asana API now has an advanced search endpoint for tasks! :tada: This new endpoint brings the power of the in-app advanced search feature to the API for the first time. Say goodbye to paginating through entire projects and inspecting every individual task to find the ones that have a particular custom field value or a particular assignee or a due date in a particular range, and say hello to simple queries! For example:

GET /workspaces/workspace-id/tasks/search ?
    completed=false &
    projects.any=123,456 &
    custom_fields.789.less_than=5 &
    assignee.any=me,you@example.com &
    due_on.after=2018-07-01 &
    due_on.before=2018-07-15

We here on the API and Developer Relations team at Asana hope that this makes it easy for you to find and fetch exactly the data you need. As always, let us know what you think! And keep an eye out for even more launches in the future! :wink:

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This new function is amazing and we would like to use it! However, as a developer of a third party tool (Bridge24), we won’t be able to use it because it is only available to Premium users only. Our tool is built for all Asana users, including non-premium users. It makes no sense to block API function calls based on if you are a Premium user or not. Please allow this function to be called by any Asana user.

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Hi @Daniel_Raymond, we hear you! Prior to launch, we had a lengthy internal discussion between the API team, developer relations, the head of product, and the head of monetization and concluded that, for the same reasons that advanced search in the web app is premium-only, advanced search in the API should also be premium-only. We already have a history of premium-only endpoints in Asana’s API: dependencies and custom fields are only available to premium users, and organization exports an SCIM user provisioning are only available to enterprise users. For the time being, the search API will remain premium-only as well, but we are collecting feedback from developers to inform the future of this and other features in the API.

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Hi Joe. Talking about premium-only features, we can’t directly compare that case with dependencies and custom_fields, as they are available or not, from the same endpoint.
So we call the api the same way, but we receive them or not in the response. (for custom fields, I don’t know about dependencies).

For the “search”, it’s different, because it’s calling the api with method1 VS method2, and completly changing all our data access and caching strategy.
That’s not a “feature” enabled or not, that we only add in the opt_fields parameter, like we do with custom_fields.

I hope you will change it eventually! Thank you.

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@Frederic_Malenfant, that’s a good point—the analogy to custom fields and dependencies isn’t as strong. The comparison to SCIM and organization exports is more fitting. For example, an app that creates backups of Asana could be built on top of the organization exports endpoint, but without it being available to all users, developers aren’t motivated to build it that way and would instead use the normal task endpoints. This was one of the reasons in favor of making search available freely, but there were stronger reasons in favor of premium-only.

Thanks for weighing in! This is one of our biggest feature launches this year, so we’re being thorough about collecting and considering all feedback.

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OK I understand, it’s the classic “developers” vs “marketing” war… :smile:
May I suggest to offer some kind of paid package for third-party developers like us, who would like to use that premium api access, even if the end-user is not premium… you can create a new “premium developer” subscription… :+1:

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