Trigger on any comment (stories) for project in Zapier or Integromat

I want to trigger a zap or integromat action when any comment (story) is added to any task within a specific project in Asana.

I have explored 3 ways of doing this, none which seem to be possible:

  1. Use the asana trigger “New Story” → the problem is, this trigger will not allow for triggering on any story on any task in a project. I have to specify a particular task. That won’t work because I don’t know in advance which task in the project will have a comment added.

  2. I thought of “polling” all tasks in a project for new comments, using a timer. I set up a “Schedule” trigger, but could not find an action in asana that lists all tasks for a project. A static list would not work because new tasks come and go on this project.

  3. I thought of triggering based on “updated task in project in asana”, but this won’t work for two reasons: a) it does not trigger when a new comment is added, and b) There is no asana action for “find stories for task”

I also found this other thread about a seemingly similar thing, but couldn’t figure out what they were actually doing there.

I tried this first in Zapier, then in Integromat. I ran into the same problem in the latter.

I am at a loss how to proceed.

Deeper explanation

I’m trying to sync comments between Asana ↔️ Active Campaign (AC) for a deals pipeline. Active Campaign has triggers for “New Deal Note Added,” so I can get comments from AC to Asana. But I cannot find a way to push new comments from Asana back to AC.

Thanks in advance for any ideas.

If you are able to code, you’ll be able to achieve this with webhooks. Right @Phil_Seeman ?

Just curious: what is it you want to do that happens on every single comment? (you don’t have to answer :grimacing: but that might help finding a workaround)

Right, it could be done with webhooks; there wasn’t any mention of coding in @Morgan_Giddings’ post so I’m guessing that’s not an option.

@Michaela_S , any thoughts on whether there’s some way to do this using Integromat?

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Hey guys!

So this sure is a tough nut to crack.

Here’s a suggestion coming from our team:

Integromat can list tasks in a project without any issues. Once the tasks are listed, you could then get the stories for the tasks.

The thing to consider here is that this sort of process has the potential to end up being expensive in terms of operations. A check of 1 task will always be 2 ops. If you have many tasks and are looking to run the automation let’s say hourly, you’ll burn a lot of operations here.

It might be worth considering experimenting with “Watch Webhook Events” and monitoring for task changes instead of listing all tasks:

Another thing to keep in mind is the fact that two-way sync generally tends to create all sorts of complexities:

  1. How to make sure the scenarios won’t end up in a vicious loop of syncing the same information over and over
  2. How to determine what change should be pushed where
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Hi, I’m finally just circling back to this.

My purpose is that some team members work on our “Deals” pipeline in AC, but Active Campaign is not very good for discussions back and forth with @mentions. So we mirror our deals into an Asana board, where we can add tasks, subtasks, and comments with @mentions. But then, we need those comments (at least) to go back to the deals pipeline in AC, so team members looking there can see what happened.

Thanks!

Hi Phil, thanks for the query. I was a coder for many years, but the main reason I don’t do it anymore is as a CEO I don’t have the time. I need(ed) a quick(ish) solution to the above, not one that requires the kinds of extensive tweaking and debugging that coding often does.

We have lived without this functionality for a month or two, it’s kind of a PITA, but we can manage, so I haven’t worked on it any more. Maybe at some point I can hire someone who knows what they’re doing to help. :wink:

Hi Michaela,
Thanks for the input on this. The “watch webhook” could work, it may be worth a try the next time I find a few moments to look into it.

I do understand recursive conditions like you describe with two-way sync, but in these days it’s so important to have a two way sync between all the various tools. Users interface at different points and with different tools, and to have data be out of sync is a no go. So it is worth having smart people solve it (it’s the kind of problem 20 years ago I would have loved working on, but have moved onto other problems). I am excited about tools like Unito for this reason, because they build in the notion of “sync” from the ground up. They don’t, however, have an ActiveCampaign module implemented yet…. so on this problem, I’m still kind of stuck.