Use Reference Custom Fields in forms, reports, grouping, and filtering

[ebalsley]

Reference Custom Fields could be a great feature, but their utility is very limited because they don’t work with many of Asana’s core features — especially forms, reports, grouping, and filtering.

Here’s one example scenario where I would like to use RCF. My team supports AV equipment in a few thousand rooms globally. All these rooms are tracked in an external database with properties such as room name, site, region, room type, etc. I created an Asana project to store each room as a “task”, so it can be used as a RCF in all other projects. I can build an API sync to automatically keep this project up to date when new rooms are created.

From there, I want to build a report counting tasks per room. I also want to build a report counting tasks per site, or per region. Those are properties of the RCF, but they are not properties of the task itself.

I want to use a form to create new tasks, where the RCF appears as a dropdown list for the user to select a room.

Inside a project, I want to group support tasks by room, and also by site.

[ebalsley]

Another example use case: I have a “project” containing Purchase Order Requests, where each item represents a PO with fields like dollar amount, budget line item, vendor, and an RCF that references another project. In list view, I need to filter this to quickly calculate the sum of all items associated with a particular project.

I also want to create a bar chart showing the total cost of each project. I would set the X-axis to this RCF, and the Y-axis to the sum of the price. Currently, I can create a bar chart like this grouped by assignee or other field, but I cannot group it by RCF.

[Richard_Sather]

Great use cases, @ebalsley you have my vote!

However, it might be a good idea to break these up into separate feedback requests since these will likely not launch at the same time. If you do that, I can help move each of your use case into each new thread you create.