Short ID for tasks

Steve_Kostrey - This suggestion is spot on. This is how Jira does it. Pretty straight forward. Simple, but great feature.

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It’s not only Jira, you need ticket numbers to keep track of features. It is implemented in a lot of systems. I appreciate the explanation why YUO need long IDs but that is another thing.
People here needs numbers relative to the project and I don’t get why after a year you didn’t implemented yet.
I need ticket numbers and if I can’t get it here, I’ll find something else, along the entire company…

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I agree. Referencing tasks inside git commits is practically impossible with Asana. Fix this please.

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Company has just moved to Asana; without this feature it’s impossible to reference Asana task numbers on our physical tracking board.

Please implement.

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This would be exceptionally useful, and the lack of this feature is making Asana difficult to use. If we want to talk about a task we can’t refer to it as “hey, did you work on 668839374825240/707209820347285?” in conversation or refer to that in comments or emails and have anyone know what we’re talking about. Even when we’re trying to link or reference tasks WITHIN Asana it’s hard to do so using the @ notation because there’s no way to easily refer to tasks. The summary of a lot of tasks can be similar, and you only see the first few words of each one, so it’s difficult to reference them through @ notation correctly when the first couple of words match.

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You’ve hit the nail on the head with your description of how useless those long identifiers are in the real world.

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I don’t really care if the URL is what it currently is (though short links would be nice) but just having SOME auto-generated, user-friendly identifier would be a huge help. YouTrack does this really nicely by assigning a serial number to each item along with a project abbreviation (which you come up with yourself). For example, if we had a Marketo integration project which we abbreviate as MKTO each ticket which is created would have a user-friendly ID of MKTO-1, MKTO-2, MKTO-3, etc. automatically generated as tickets are created. You can then use @notation to refer to tickets using these values, such as as “What is the status of @MKTO-2?” which would link to the MKTO-2 ticket.

It would be very helpful if we could do something similar in Asana, giving each project an abbreviation and then having tickets be assigned a serial number for the project they are created in (even if they’re added to a different project later) so that we can @reference them easily.

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I think that to have a short URL like “Log in - Asana” which some other people mentioned we’d need to have workspaces with unique shortnames as part of the URL, either as a part of the path or as a subdomain. The workspace shortname might be auto-assigned or customizable by the user, but it would need to be unique. Projects within a workspace would also need to have their own, unique-within-a-workspace shortname. You could end up with a path of “https://mysworkspace.app.asana.com/HR-206” or “Log in - Asana”.

Even with the longer URLs, however, it’s still extremely useful to have a short name like HR-206 to refer to tasks by, both for @notation and for URLs and references in emails, where you can show the short name but the URL can go to the longer link. A short URL showing up in the address bar would save you some steps if you’re copying and pasting a link in an email so that the end user might know what you’re talking about without even clicking a link, but just having the short task ID generated in the first place would go a long way to easing communication about these issues.

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Developer here. There’s no reason the ID’s have to be big if you had Projects/Tasks scoped per domain. Those ID’s should start at 1 instead of using their SQL ID ( which is what I’m assuming you’re doing ). If you update this, we will take you guys up in business.

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We would love this feature too! So much easier to have a short ID for each task.

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We’re evaluating Asana currently as on option to replace our main task system, and the lack of shortish, meaningful task IDs, is kind of a show stopper for us, for reasons well covered here.

In short, one of the key bits of reference for a ticketing system (the ticket, or its ID if you prefer) is unwieldy to use. Not just in Asana, but outside, IRL too.

We love the social interface, and things are fine with ~8 users and medium throughput, but we’re looking for a solution for multiple teams of people with reams of tickets, and it’s seeming like Asana is not geared for large teams, or small teams with lots of tickets.

Manual naming strategies, shadow systems, or link shrinks are not appealing workarounds for the problem.

It’s also kind of concerning that there’s only been what looks to be one response by someone from Asana, a year ago. Is this issue on the radar? Something in the works hopefully?

Is there maybe an Asana task system for Asana tasks that I should be posting this to instead? Sorry for the grocery list, but while I’m at it, sorting by votes would probably be a handy metric to expose-- ah, I see “votes” here but “likes” in other categories, so this probably is the issue system as well as the community portal.

It’d be cool to have this bit actually be in Asana, i.e. “dogfooding”, similar to how some other systems do it… anyhow, the IDs is the main thing, just tossed in the stuff about feedback in general when it struck me.

Great product overall, just a couple issues making it tough for us to spring for it.

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I’d like to propose that Asana adds task ID’s. Usually when working in a team, it’s helpful to be able to speak a task ID like “Task 12”, and the others on the call will easily be able to spot the task in asana, or be able to find it by sorting.

The task ID should simply be the ordinal number of the task created within the project.

This idea is taken from Jira task ID’s.

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You can enable row numbers and refer to the ‘task row 12’ for all the projects, etc.

They talk about it here, it’s under your ‘my profile settings’ - How to Control Your Profile Settings in Asana | Product guide • Asana Product Guide

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The issue with this is that the tasks can change rows, so you could say to someone “Did you hear anything back about task 4?” and the task in row 4 today might be different than the task in row 4 tomorrow. Row numbers are not permanent, and so can’t be used for this purpose.

Here are some other threads about this:

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I worked on Facebook’s internal task system for years (after Dustin left to start Asana): we used auto-increment task numbers everywhere. A task needs to be easily reference-able, as we mention them in groups, in other tasks, in diffs and commits, and vocally of course. We even entertained the idea of using mnemonics to refer to individual tasks as the auto-increment numbers got large (never tried this though).

I have no idea what Asana’s infrastructure looks like, but I feel like it wouldn’t be too much work to associate each task with a workspace unique autoincrement ID (or something human memorizable, say under 10MM). Referring to a task like vaultio#123 wouldn’t just be nice, it’s essential.

My first impressions with Asana working at my own company, after years of both using and leading development of Facebook’s tasks system, is that perhaps Asana doesn’t understand how important integration with other services (internal and external) is to the relative success of a task management system. A human memorizable reference number and a fast, stable API are no brainer first steps here (the former of course not existing, and the latter is very very slow, taking over 3 seconds to cut a task in our anecdotal experience).

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I will add my vote to this issue. Much like most others I would be happy enough to have the short-ID be a field that is searchable, not necessarily a part of the URL.
Though if asana would know which domain you belong to since you’re logged in and only search in those. That would allow for a short URL like Log in - Asana that would automatically use the login info, perform a search on your domain, so duplicate IDs are sorted out by cutting down on the namespace scope.

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This has been a broken record issue since at least 2013. Same needs, same unworkable workaround suggestions, and then the thread is buried for a bit. I doubt it will change or even be addressed as a problem anytime soon.

You evaluate more than current capabilities when vetting software… the lack of any issue ID control and lack of any real markup support (asciidoc, markdown, etc.) are the main “show stoppers” for us, but the lack of any way to track Asana tasks (like this one-- it’d be neat if people could track an Asana task for it, versus subscribing to various zombie threads in a forum) also make it hard to swallow. It’d be great to see Asana using Asana, versus Discourse, basically.

YouTrack does task IDs well, that would be a good model to follow-- you can even set a task ID when importing so as to get a seamless crossover from System X to YouTrack. A smart thing to support if you’re trying to get market share in this space.

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+1 !
We would be so grateful to have this feature. A short ID will improve our team communication and will be easier to make a link between PR in git with asana task.

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There’s nothing quite as unsatisfying as chiming in on a deadhorse topic…but on the off chance that the Product Team at Asana is watching this thread…I’ll simply say that the absence of this feature is the one show-stopper that is preventing me from bringing my whole team workflows into Asana.

I’ve been a personal user of Asana for years…but without this feature I cannot bring my team over onto the service…it’s a deal killer. #sadness.

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46 people asking for the same thing and not one response from Asana… no man!?!

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