What I’m looking to do is produce a weekly report for one project with the following outline:
- Sections (from the board view)
- Tasks associated with each section
- Updates associated with each task within a specified a date range
I say this because we have some long running tasks and I’m trying to promote the practice of owners making weekly updates. By generating a simple report like this which is shared with executive sponsors, it will mean we can get away with fewer meetings (and who doesn’t want that?)
I’m agnostic about the reporting tool - CSV would be fine. I’ve done an export of my project data, but that didn’t include the sections or updates. I started looking at the API docs, but thought I would ask for any suggestions first. Thanks.
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Hi Mike,
I’m curious what you mean by ‘I’m agnostic about the reporting tool.’ Could you elaborate on that?
The general approach is that if you can solve an issue in the environment you work in, do it. Don’t get to additional tools if you don’t need to.
What I’m saying is that Asana is designed to make reporting easier.
Have you tried the following approaches?
- Using dedicated functionality ‘set status’ to run a manual report?
- Setting up the dashboard in a project to automatically generate data you want and then easily export them?
With dashboard view, you can then build automated export on a weekly basis, which is sent to your mail, slack channel etc.
How do you see that?
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Thanks for your response @Jack_Remote_Sensei. By agnostic about the tool, I mean I don’t care if it’s done in Asana or through an export or API to something else.
I reviewed your two suggestions and it seems neither solves my problem:
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Status update is to provide a single update for the entire project - while I want the updates already entered at the task level.
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Dashboards are a collection of charts which show task statuses but not the content of updates as I explained above.
I see in the API docs that task notes are accessible - is that the same as an update entered through the web interface (“Ask a question or post an update”)?
I played around with the task API using CURL and I am able to pull project updates (e.g. "S and I met this morning to brainstorm. As a next step we’re going to meet with G and align on our objectives and approach "). I’ll see if I can put the right steps together to give me the raw data I need for my report.
I ended up using Python so I could automate the process. Using the API I can now pull the fields I want from the API and save to an Excel file. Sample record:
