This field is used in too many tasks; reordering options is disabled.

I see this error / notification in a custom field that I am using (across multiple boards). But I NEED to reorder the options, so what the heck do I do?

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It seems here the same problem was discussed: this project has too many tasks to be sorted by assignee - #3 by Rebecca_McGrath

It looks like the answer provided was responding to something different – I’m wondering how I can reorder the option, not sort by assignee…

Yeah I was kind of referring to Bastien’s message further up in the thread where he listed the same error message. And this project has too many tasks to be sorted by assignee - #7 by Bastien_Siebman

@Rebecca_McGrath can you confirm whether there is a specific limitation when trying to reorder custom fields?

Hi folks, I can confirm that if a custom field is associated to more than 25k tasks, we disallow reordering options for that custom field. Is this the case for you, @Jenna_Doctoroff?

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I was going to post about this as well, and saw this thread. I also have this problem at the enterprise scale. For context, in my case we have a custom field dropdown for Business Unit, and we have ~14 business units in the organization. This field is shared broadly and a lot of projects/tasks use this field to identify and track work. Using a library field makes perfect sense here. Slowly over time Business Units change their names and new Business Units get created. I’m able to add new items to the custom field, but they are forced to appear at the bottom of the list, out of alphabetical order. I wish I could at least sort the list alphabetically, though a custom sort would be ideal.

From a technical standpoint, I’m curious why this limitation exists. From using the API I know every option in a single/multi-select custom field has it’s own GID, so it should be possible to reorder the list without breaking the selected enum_value.gid associated with a given task. Maybe other backend processes rely on the order of items in the list (that might make sense from a database optimization standpoint). If that’s the case, I would appreciate some option to submit a request to have a field re-ordered, even if it is a process that has to run overnight or take time for Asana to process. In my case I don’t need to change these fields frequently, and I would be fine restricting this type of request to account admins. As an enterprise customer, these widely-used fields start to degrade in quality over time and cause confusion when people go to use them.

Thanks

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