Project Template: Can a Parent Task and a Subtask be created to live in the same Project?

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I recently ran into a problem where changes in Asana made it impossible to create a Task Template where the Parent Task AND Subtasks can live in the same project. You can construct the Parent and Subtasks like that and convert to template, but the homing of the Subtasks gets removed. This was definitely NOT how Asana functioned previously, because I have a few old Task Templates that I made that still do this. So, it seems like new templates made this way are the ones affected.

So, I’ve been asked recently by our business owner to make some modifications to a very highly used Project Template.

Within this Project Template, there will be at least 1 Parent Task with a Subtask that both NEED to live within the project that is created by that Template. To put it lightly, that Parent Task and Subtask will basically be the two most important types of Asana task in our entire company.

Am I safe to create this? Is it even going to work? It sorta fits the paradigm of the first example (Parent and SubTask living in the same project, created by a template…just, from a Project Template this time instead of a Task Template). This is a functionality that I have unfortunately lost, and have had to implement some really unintuitive workarounds for.

In this case, if it won’t work, or I am advised that this functionality is likely to be broken/nerfed in the future, I’m really going to struggle to find an appropriate workaround.

I’m going to NEED the people who are using that Parent Task to have that Subtask showing up in that Parent Task, but if it’s not likewise showing up in the Project’s Board/Calendar/Timeline views, then we’re going to be missing deadlines and having angry customers.

I suppose this could all be solved if Asana would give us a toggle at the top of the screen of all Project Views that said “Include All Subtasks”. Especially Calendar view. ESPECIALLY Calendar view.

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Hi @Matt5 ,

I tested this in a project template and could not get subtasks to be added to the template (only to other projects). I never attempted this prior to the bug you reported a couple weeks ago with task templates, so I can’t comment if this functionality was available before then.

Have you tried using search to display the task/subtasks you want on a calendar? When you search for tasks in a project, it actually returns tasks and subtasks (haven’t tested below the first layer), which is odd since Asana doesn’t consider subtasks to be associated with the parent’s project(s) in the UI or API…

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Yes, we have used that functionality to some degree, in different situations. We have a bunch of tasks with custom field settings specifically so that we can isolate them out on saved-searches on Calendar view. It sorta pulls “that one specific type of task” from every project in Asana into one Calendar, which is great.

However, being a “workaround” for the situation we are discussing at-hand, it’s not a good solution for our whole company. Most of my users are NOT advanced users, and we’ve come to the realization that the cause of much of their confusion is because we’ve had to implement SO many workarounds for some of these unintuitive issues that it really confuses them. Especially new people we on-board.

A good example would be the lack of an ability to get a timeline view of the subtasks within a parent tasks. I can get all sorts of BEAUTIFUL dependencies, relative due dates, etc, but you cannot see those subtasks on a timeline view, unless they are homed all in the same project. That’s really messy for us, but we implemented a workaround that has resulted in us having a LOT more projects than we really wanted to have. This is a topic for another discussion thread, so forgive me for hijacking this one lol.