Automatically link two items in two boards

Platform discussions Special workflows & use cases
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Hello everyone,

Do you know if it is possible to do the following use case ?

  • I create an item in board A
  • I create a sub-item in the item of board A
  • When I create the sub-item (or when I change the status of this sub-item if it is more simple), I would like an automation to create an item in board B
  • The item in board B would be automatically linked with sub-item from board A

Thank you for your help ! Have a nice day,

Corentin

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I work in a creative production environment with two major teams:
- Client/Account Exec (Traffic): Owns the Parent Jobs / Enters the child production items required to complete the job
- Production (Creative): Takes ownership of the child production items until completed

We quickly found subitems to be restrictive for our creative production team as there was no way for them to quickly view all their assigned subitems in one view without them being separated/collapsed under the parent job. Lots of clicking and scrubbing up and down between separate jobs.

We solved it by creating all the child items in a different board and linking everything by adding the parent Item ID as (what we call) a JobLink (using a tags field) before triggering the creation of a child items in a separate board.

We simply click on the JobLink (in either the parent item or the child items) to have the tag search assemble the entire job for us in one view. Problem solved!

…Now to start saving time by automating the manual cut & paste:
We would love to save a step and have our dedicated “JobLink” field in the parent board autopopulate with the Item ID as a tag.

It would be amazing if the “Item Default Values” interface could somehow accept formulas.

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Im interested in your solution. But having a trouble understanding what you guys did. Could you perhaps rephrase or bullet point your steps so I may better understand how you solved it?

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Certainly, Jaewoo.

Two boards:

  • Parent Jobs
  • Child Tasks

The parent job contains a Unique Job # (Item ID column) and a JobLink (Tags column). When the item is created, it generates an item ID, click it (copy it) and paste it into the JobLink field.

We created a hidden status field with an “Active” and “Inactive” status.
We then created a button that would change the status to “Active.”
Then we set an action “When status changes to something (Active), create an item in another board (Child board) and link them using the link to item column in this board.”
We created an automation that would watch for the status to to “Active” and set it back to “Inactive.” …ready for another button push.

This ‘status change’ triggered item creation was important for us to include all the needed details in the parent job before creating one or more child items in the separate board. This process allows us to create child items with mirrored details, including the “JobLink” and leave others blank for individual status, deadlines, owners, etc.

Click the “JobLink” and let the search pull together the parent and child items with their unique metatag.

The mirroring, linking and metatagging itemID’s allowed us to leverage boards like relative tables in a DB.

Let me know if it’s still not making sense.

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