Show full path, not just immediate parent, for subtasks in search results

Hi!

I’m wondering if you could extend how search results are currently shown. Right now, most search results are useless as-is (for my team’s setup), because to find out the overall parent-parent task context, I have to click “details” on every single search result.

That is, the one of the premade search options, “Recently Completed Tasks,” with a filter for those I’m a collaborator on, would be a big help for weekly summaries of what I’ve been up to. But instead, the search results (mostly subtasks I’ve done as part of a 2-level-deep task hierarchy) do not tell me which tasks the subtasks ultimately belong too—only their immediate parent. The problem with that is, we use a task template, so all the subtasks and sub-subtasks have the same names across different “main” tasks. I want to be able to see the “main” task name in search results.

There are two ways this could be implemented, and either would work fine:

  1. Show the full hierarchy (X → Y → Z) in the “Task name” search result field, not just “Y → Z” as it currently does.
  2. Have a separate search result field (“Task root,” perhaps?) showing the highest-level parent task (X). (This could be an optional field somehow, as long as that preference can be saved with “Save report.”)

In both cases, a helpful additional feature would be the ability to sort search results by the column containing this information (“Task name” in the case of 1, or “Task root” in the case of 2.)

Thanks!

Thanks for taking the time to provide this feedback @Kevin_Bloch :slight_smile:

Hopefully a more in-depth search results list is something our Product team can implement in the future! I’ll keep you posted on any updates on this thread :slight_smile:

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Thanks, Rebecca! The implementation would be even more useful if it applied everywhere, on second thought. For example, I’m noticing it’s also something lacking on Asana’s Inbox page. Can’t wait to have this feature!

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It’s cool that this was implemented, thanks! Unfortunately our team had to revert from using it back to cloning a fake template task, because the built-in template way automatically makes adds a collaborator to every single subtask in the hierarchy, making way too many notifications for the manager doing the templating/cloning.

Ah, sorry, forgot I already reported this: be able to remove a collaborator from a whole task hierarchy

Hi, it seems this was implemented in the search results, but it would be great to have it in the notifications and in the task dependencies as well.

  • when activity happens on a sub-task, the notification header shows the project name and sub-task name only (i.e. “Project Name > Sub-task”), but not the parent task(s) in the task hierarchy.

  • when a sub-task is linked as a dependency on another task, the “Dependencies” field shows only the sub-task name (i.e. “Sub-task Name”), and not the parent task(s) in the task hierarchy.

This is often confusing, especially when using task templates with sub-tasks (resulting in many sub-tasks with the same name). It would be great if the full task hierarchy, or at least the parent task name, is included in those paths.

  • Notifications: “Project Name > Grandparent Task > Parent Task > Sub-task”, or at least “Project Name > … > Parent Task > Sub-task”
  • Dependencies: “Sub-task < Parent Task < Grandparent Task”, or at least “Sub-task < Parent Task”

On second thought, if the sub-task’s parent is itself a sub-task, I guess the minimum would be to show the root task name. For example, with the following task hierarchy:

  • Task A
    • Task B
      • Task C
        • Task D

Notifications: “Project Name > Task A > … > Task D”
Dependencies: “Task D < … < Task A”