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My organization has a very large amount of custom fields.
When adding a field to a project, if you search for a field name, those search results of of limited length (appears to be 30 results). So the Asana standard field is not returned in the list because there so many custom fields having matching names.
If you do not use the search function but, instead, scroll through the list of fields manually trying to find it, it will continually load fields in an “infinite scroll” experience, loading more fields as you reach the bottom. However in our library this will eventually through a browser exception (too many concurrent LunaDB tokens) and require an Asana reload.
Steps to reproduce:
Create 50 new custom fields all having a name with a variation of “Task Progress”
Now try to add a custom field to a project and try to find specific “Task Progress” fields.
Browser version:
Chrome latest
What version of Asana are you using (Basic/Premium/Business/Enterprise)?
Enterprise (I think, not sure)
I wish there was a more efficient way to have visibility into and to manage custom fields and Asana-created fields. To the OP’s point, we have multiple variations of custom fields serving essentially the same purpose. It’s getting very cluttered!
In our situation, even if people were actively trying to “do the right thing” and re-use templated fields they simply cannot because it is not possible to add them to projects anymore.
Thanks for your post, and I apologise for any inconvenience this limitation has at is is expected behaviour from our system.
I understand how this limitation can be a blocker for you and your team, so I will note your request to make sure it gets to our Product team. Understanding use cases like this is really important to us, and we track all user feedback in order to improve the product.
Thanks a lot for your insight and again apologies!
Thanks for this insight, but removing other custom fields isn’t a viable solution here.
For example, there is an Asana-native field called “Progress”
There are many valid custom fields within my organization also containing the word “Progress” which should not be deleted. The problem isn’t the existence of custom fields; the problem is that Asana field search appears to only returns the top 30-ish more recent ones.
Our names do include a differentiator. The problem is that they also contain the word “Progress” which makes them return as search results when searching for “Progress”
Since the number of search results returned it limited, we can see the 30 most recently custom fields having the word “Progress” in their name but we cannot see the standard Asana field.
We have many custom fields with names like “Progress [differentiator]” such as “Legal Progress” or “Progress through permitting”
There is a built-in asana field named “Progress”
However, if I search for “Progress” Asana appears to return the 30 most-recently added matches.
Consequently, the results are like this:
“Legal Progress”
“Progress through permittions”
… [many other custom fields containing matching text]
I am looking for the standard Asana field simply called “Progress” but it does not get returned from the search because there are too many other custom fields having similar names.
I am not trying to find a custom field. I am trying to find the standard Asana fields like those indicated in this post:
I understand that I could just make another custom field which is a carbon-copy of the built-in field.
But I should not have to do this. This creates a negative feedback loop which encourages (even requires!) people to create unnecessary custom fields.
I believe having more than 30 fields to track a type of progress is also something you shouldn’t do. Agreeing on only a few for the entire company would be ideal…
I even go further with my clients and challenge the field in the first place. From experience, I can guarantee that a good chunk of the tasks in such an account are not up-to-date, because people don’t bother update the progress field. And when there is a “Completed” status that’s even worse because sometimes they don’t also complete the task or there is no rules to do it automatically…
We have multiple-hundreds-of-thousands of employees.
While I agree with you that the organization should have better discipline with the use of custom fields the issue I’m pointing out here is that it’s difficult to exercise discipline now because the standard fields are literally unusable
One way to solve this problem would be to have search results asynchronously load in results as the user scrolls down just like how it works when you’re not searching.
When there are no search criteria Asana will “load more” when you reach the bottom, but if you have any search criteria then it will not. It will only return a fixed count.
create yours and name it « Progress (standard) » and you are good