Most Conditions and Actions for Rules are
self-explanatory. Here are a few notes on how
to use specific Conditions and Actions, that
might not be obvious.
In addition to these tips, note that you can
use Flowsana's Variable
Substitution capability in
rule conditions and
actions; see Variable Substitution in
Flowsana for details.
CONDITIONS
Starts or
due...
Date-based rule
conditions are evaluated in two
ways: (1) when a task's date is
changed, and (2) between
approximately midnight and 1 am in
your time zone.
When using any of the
date-based rule conditions, you
must properly set
the My Time
Zone field on
the My
Account page of
your Flowsana portal. Flowsana
needs to know your time zone in
order for it to know exactly when
“today”, “in 3 days”, etc. occurs
for you.
In addition to the
date-based conditions which
determine whether a task falls in
a certain date range, there are
also a set of date conditions
which let you determine whether a
task's date has been set, cleared,
or modified, without regard to the
actual date. "Set" means the date
was blank and now contains some
date. "Cleared" means the date had
a value and that value was
removed. "Changed" means either
the date was set, was cleared, or
it changed from one value to
another. ("Changed" is a superset
of "set" and "cleared", so don't
use "set" or "cleared" for a
project's tasks if you're using
"changed".) In all of these
set/cleared/changed cases, you can
monitor tasks' start dates, due
dates, or both.
Name contains
the word or phrase...
You can use this
condition to match a word or phrase
(i.e. a set of consecutive words)
anywhere in the name of a task. The
comparison is not case-sensitive; i.e.
it will match regardless of whether
the word or phrase has any
capitalization in it or not. Also,
punctuation is ignored, so it will
match regardless if you have quotation
marks, exclamation points, etc.
Normally it will
match on a whole word or phrase; that
is, there must be a space if the word
or phrase has other words around it.
However, you can use * (the asterisk
symbol) as a "wild card" indicator at the front and/or end of the word or phrase, to
override this and match on partial
words. Here are some examples of
this:
Word entered for
this condition: cat
Task name: Feed the cat and dogResult: MatchTask name: Identify the catalyst for this equationResult: No matchTask name: Pick up a housecat at the shelterResult: No match
Word entered
for this condition: cat*
Task name: Feed the cat and dogResult: MatchTask name: Identify the catalyst for this equationResult: MatchTask name: Pick up a housecat at the shelterResult: No match
Word
entered for this
condition: *cat
Task name: Feed the cat and dogResult: MatchTask name: Identify the catalyst for this equationResult: No matchTask name: Pick up a housecat at the shelterResult: Match
Has
custom field set to...
This
condition supports all
custom field types: dropdown list,
text, number, multi-select,
people, and
date.
For text fields,
in addition to checking for the
presence of a specific text value,
you can also use *
(the asterisk symbol) as a "wild
card", to match partial text. The *
wild card symbol works identically
here to the behavior described in the
above Name contains the word or
phrase... section, so
see that above description for details
on usage.
There is one additional feature
available here, in addition to the
above description: if you
put [*] as
the value to match for a text
custom field (that's an asterisk
surrounded by square brackets),
that tells Flowsana to match any text or
number. In other words, putting
[*] tells Flowsana, "if anything
at all is entered into this custom
field, then perform this rule."
Falls
during a
holiday or time
off...
This rule condition allows you to take an
action
when a task gets scheduled during a
holiday or a user's scheduled time
off.
Whenever a task is
assigned to someone in the target project,
or an assigned user's task in that project
has its start/due dates changed, this rule
will be evaluated, and if the assigned
start/due dates fall within one or more
time-off entries in the "holiday/time off
calendar", the rule's action will be
taken.
To use this rule condition, you create a
project that holds the
holiday/time-off information and
then select that "holiday/time
off calendar" project when
creating this condition in a target
project.
Here are the steps to
create the project which holds the
holiday/time-off
information - we'll call it the
"holiday/time off
calendar" project:
- Create the project and name it
whatever you
choose. It can reside anywhere in
your Asana instance that you have
access to.
- In the project, create or add one
and only one people-type custom field. You
can name this field whatever you
choose (we've named in "Employees" in
the example below). This field is used
to identify
which user or users a particular
time-off entry applies to. (Alternatively you can use the Assignee field; see below for more on that.)
- Add tasks in the project for each
time-off
entry, as follows:
- You can name the tasks whatever
you
choose.
- Set the task's due date (if it's a
single-day event, like a holiday),
or its start and due date (if it's
a multi-day event, like a user's
vacation).
- In the people-type custom field,
select
the user or users that this
time-off applies to. You can also
leave this custom field blank, in
which case it will apply to any
user in the project. (This
is useful for company-wide
holidays, for example.)
Here's an example of what this
"time off calendar" project might look
like:

Other than the above
requirements, you can set up this project
however you'd like - for example, you can
group the tasks into sections, you can add
any other custom fields you choose to (as
long as they are not people-type fields),
etc.
To then use this rule condition, select the above
"time
off calendar" project when creating the condition in a target project:

Two useful actions you
might
want to use in combination with
this
trigger condition are Add a
comment... or Send an
email
notification... to
alert the
user that a task has been assigned
during
their time off. Because you can
use
Flowsana's Variable
Substitution in the
comment or
email notification, you can
include
details about the offending task,
its
dates, etc. Note that if you use {task.Assignee} in the Add a
comment... action,
Flowsana will
convert that to an @mention of that
user. Here's an example of how a
comment could look:

NOTE: If you prefer, you can use the Assignee field instead of a people-type custom field to identify the user that a given time-off date or date range applies to. To use the Assignee field, simply omit any people-type custom fields from the "time off calendar" project; if Flowsana does not find any people-type custom fields in that project, it will automatically use the Assignee field instead.
The disadvantage to using the Assignee field is that it only holds one user, so you'll need to replicate a time-off event if you need to apply it to multiple users. The advantage is that it will show in users' My Tasks so their upcoming time off is visible.
ACTIONS
Send an
email notification to...
With this
action, you can have people be
notified when any Flowsana rule
condition changes. You can choose one
of four options for recipients of the
notification:
- the task's
assignee
- the task's
followers
- all project
members
- a
value in a custom field
By default, the notification email
will identify exactly what changed;
here is an example:

However, you have the
ability to specify your own custom
Subject and/or Body content for
the notification email, which will
supersede the above defaults. You
can also use Flowsana's Variable
Substitution feature to
include fields from the triggering
task in the subject and/or body
that you specify. Note that currently, the
email body only supports plain text and
does not support the entry of HTML or
Markup language.
If you select the last
option to identify the
recipient(s) in a custom field's
value:
- the
custom field should contain the
email address of the desired
recipient
- it
can be either a text custom field
or a single-select dropdown list
custom field
- if
it's a text custom field, you can
populate it with one email
address, or with multiple email
addresses separated by semi-colons
to send notifications to multiple
people
Assign
To...
This
action allows to you assign a task. In
addition to selecting a specific user name
as the assignee, you can also choose to
assign the task to the value in a text- or
single-select-type custom field that you
specify. This allows you to dynamically
assign tasks by populating that custom
field, either manually or via another
rule. The custom field can contain either
the name or the email address of an Asana
user in your organization or
workspace.
Create a
new project from a
template...
This action lets you
automatically create
new projects from an Asana template based
on any rule condition occurring. You
specify the template to use as the source
for the new project and the name you'd
like the new project to be called. You can
optionally specify a team in which you
want the new project created; if you do
not specify a team, the new project will
be created in the same team as the task
that triggered the rule.
When specifying the desired project name,
you can
use Flowsana's Variable
Substitution feature to
include fields
from the task that triggered the rule
in the name of the new project. For
example, you can
include {task.name} which will be replaced
with the name of the triggering
task.
If the template being copied has Flowsana
Rules attached to it, those Rules will be
duplicated into the newly created project.
Add
subtasks...
This action lets you automatically add a
predefined set of subtasks to a
task based on any rule condition. To
use this action, you create a task, in any
project outside of the target project, and
add a set of subtasks underneath it. This
task becomes in essence a “subtask
template”, and the subtasks become the
subtasks that will be created underneath
whatever task triggered the rule. For
example, you could say that if a new task
is created in a particular project, add a
certain set of subtasks to it. Or if a
task is moved into a certain column
(section), or if it has some custom field
set to some particular value, or gets a
certain tag added to it, etc., then add a
certain set of subtasks to it.
The template and its subtasks can
reside in any project other than the
target project where the subtasks will
be added into (this avoids potential
endless loops of adding subtasks). The
recommended approach is that you
create a project, let’s call it
“Subtask Templates”, and this project
is where you house all of these
“subtask template” tasks.
This rule action supports dependencies, in two ways.
First, you can set dependencies
between the subtasks within the
template, and those same dependencies
will be set on the tasks that get
created from the template. Second, if
you want to have a dependency
relationship between one or more
subtasks and the top-level task that
triggered the rule (i.e. the task
under which the new subtasks get
created), then set the desired
relationship between the subtask(s) in
the template and the "subtask
template" task (that is, the top-level
task which contains the template
subtasks).
You can also optionally have Flowsana
add start/due dates to the
subtasks it adds. To do this, set a
date on the "subtask template" task,
then set dates on subtasks that you
wish to have dated, where the subtask
dates reflect the appropriate relative
spacing from the
"subtask template" date. (We recommend
you set dates far in the future so
it's clear that these are just
"placeholder" dates.)
Then, when you create the
task that triggers the "Add subtasks"
rule (that is, the task under which
the subtasks get added), set its
actual due date. Flowsana will then
populate the subtask dates
appropriately, relative to this actual
date.
For example, let's say you
have an employee onboarding template
and have three subtasks that you want
performed two weeks, one week, and one
day prior to the onboarding deadline.
Set your template like this:

If you then trigger the "Add
subtasks" rule on a task that has a due
date of July 16, this will be the
result:

In other words, Flowsana calculated the
relative distance between each of the
template subtasks and the parent "subtask
template" task's due date; then it took the
actual target date (that is, the due date of
the task triggering the rule) of July 16 and
it set
the date of each subtask to the same
relative distance from July 16 -
two weeks, one week, and one day.
If you are using the above date
capabilities in your subtasks, you have the
choice whether to have Flowsana skip weekends
or not, via your setting of the "Skip
weekends" checkbox option when you define the
rule.
Additionally, you can use Flowsana's Variable Substitution capability within
subtasks in your subtask template, in both
the name of a subtask and in text-type
custom fields. This allows you to pull
values from the parent task into
subtasks.
Add
tasks...
This action lets you automatically add
tasks from a template of pre-built tasks.
It is very similar to the Add
subtasks... action described
above; in fact, all of the above Add
subtasks... documentation applies
to this Add tasks... action as
well. The only difference is that instead
of letting you add subtasks below
the task that triggered the rule, this
action lets you add top-level tasks
immediately following (i.e. below) the
task that triggered the rule.
Even though you are creating
them as subtasks within the template
project, using this rule action, they will
become top-level tasks when added to the
destination project.
Note: The template subtasks can
themselves have subtasks below them, and
these will become subtasks in the
destination project.