Automatic subitem owner assigning

Hello monday.com community,

Is there a custom recipe to automatically assign subitem creator as an owner of a subitem or at least owner of the main task?

We have board permissions set, so that only assignees to the people column can update items and create subitems.

At the moment subitem is empty, but nobody can do anything with it until board owner has assigned it to someone.

Are there any workarounds?

Many thanks,
Sanita

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Hey @sanita.si!

I would recommend using a custom automation to do this: Build your own custom automation

If you use this recipe, you can click into “subitem” and choose who the owner will be:


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I have a simular situation, but in this automation the owner is set by the automation. I want to make an automation where the created subitem automaticly takes over the item owner as an owner.

With items you can do this with the automation:

WHEN AN ITEM IS CREATED ASSIGN CREATOR AS OWNER
But this doesn’t support subitems.

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Seems there is also an error. For example if I would click create subitem it would sometimes automatically assign my colleague not myself.

@bramnaus Thanks for bringing this our attention and this is a known limitation which we are working to address. For some perspective, here’s an idea of the options we are currently considering:

  • Assign creator of parent item to subitem
  • Map column fields from parent item to subitem
  • Inherit the item column fields into the subitem via automation

Although we cannot offer a specific time frame for release, I would recommend monitoring your ‘What’s New’ section (profile picture → What’s New) for upcoming releases.

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@sanita.si Given your board has the ‘Edit rows assigned to them in the People column’ permission enabled, I may recommend exploring the option of utilizing a ‘team’ as the assignee.

When creating the custom recipe, you could set-up the following:

The idea would be that you create a team with all the relevant users, then when the item is created, this group of users would be able to edit the item accordingly.

How do you think this option would work for you?

You can see more here on how to create a team.

Any updates on this?

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has this received any development? It has been a year.

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@bethk do you know if there is any update on this one? I like many in this thread am unable to assign parent person to subitem assignment through any automation. Another idea would be to use the dynamic (me) as the assigner at the time of entry. For example if you are assigned to the main task as a manager/leader or the task owner/team member - you could hit a button to create a subitem and assign the subitem to one of those 2 folks automatically.

This is something that would be very useful, and while mostly geared towards project management, can have other practical applications as others have mentioned. Having the ability to automatically complete subitem fields is very useful. In my case, assigning the owner by default to the items’ owner would save a lot of time and potential errors. (What if I am filing in a bunch of subitems across multiple groups, and forget to go back and then assign them - now we have lost accountability.)

At least having it default to the parent items owner would better than having it blank. At least having the wrong person would (should) trigger that person to pipe up and say “not my job!” versus having no assignments. Also being able to have the notifications of due dates would be missed if there is no-one assigned to the subitem or subtask.

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Hi, we have exactly the same issue, but have a workaround using Make. Until subitems have better support across all automations in Monday we could see any other way that was flexible enough


We created a Webhook integration “When subitem is created send webhook”. This triggers a process in Make that looks at the subitem and can fill in any field (or multiple fields)
 in our case it assigns a specific person from the parent item to the subitem, pushes the timeline column forward by two days and notifies the manager who has been assigned.

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Bumping this to see if there are any updates?

Our board contains a rather large dataset that is not ready to be archived on another board. In the meantime we are forced to leverage a button automation to create subitems and its starting to show lower performance in runtime.

Original ask: can we have people assigned have the ability to create subitems without an automation in a restricted board?

In general, subitems need more automations functionality. Simple triggers and actions for custom automation recipes, like a “When subitem is created
” trigger are long overdue, so we could automatically assign subitems to the person who makes them, OR to the parent item’s owner. But it should be flexible enough to support both use cases just like regular item automations.

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Any updates on this being developed?

Just coming back to this - but this solution would work for me. I am just starting out with make, and I can’t figure out how to interact with subitems. I am going to go into make now and see if I can create a scenario that basically just says “When subitem is created assign subitem to item owner.” I’m glad to know it can be done - off to see what I can do.

@TRB-monday.com Any updates on this? It has been awhile and this would be a very useful feature for those of us that use sub-items as essentially task lists for different project scenarios.

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Checking if anyone has seen an update to feature to date? Thank you.

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Sorry for the delay
 With Monday you can use either set Webhooks to trigger from the Main item or from subitems, it depends on which column you need to use as a trigger.

If you are triggering from a Main item, then when make recieves the call you need to tick the option to read subitems in Make, and then you can iterate through each of the subitems in turn, (or use filters to select which onces to act on).

If you trigger the webhook from a subitem column, then Make gets the call from the subitem board. This means you can process the specific subitem, or read all items from the subitem board to process other subitems, OR get use the ItemParentBoardID to go back up to the Main item!

I hope that sort of makes sense! We use all the options above depending on the what the user is trying to achieve. (for example: User has update people, percentages and values in subitems. They then press a “RE-CALC” button on the Main Item, so the make process works through each subitem re-calculating various fields and updating the people column.

Matthew

@BiancaT @khamblett could you provide an update on this?

It seems to be an ongoing issue, and would be pretty useful if resolved.

Thanks in advance!

Hey all,

We developed an app that solves this problem and allows to set the subitem’s owner based on the parent item owner.

On creation -

On change -

We’re currently working on a new version that will also support assigning the creator of the subitem as owner.

You can find it in the monday.com marketplace in the platform or here - https://monday.com/marketplace/10000287

Hope that helps and if you have any questions I’m available - daniel@fantasymedia.io

Cheers!