Hi everyone,
I have a request & a related bug about sub-items.
I know sub-items are in beta but I would like to know if there’s a plan to allow automating of sub-items in item creation?
My main goal is to have the ability to create an automated checklist for my team when a task is created.
For example, if I create a new task and tag it somehow (either by a Status column or any other way), it will create some kind of a relevant checklist of sub-tasks for it.
So I’m guessing using sub-items is a good approach for this.
Now to allow this auto-creation, I have to pull that checklist data from somewhere.
So 2 options I’m thinking of are:
Pulling it from a different board (kinda like a VLOOKUP for those sub-items) - more robust and scalable.
Setting a specific automation for each type of task that will create those sub-items - not scalable.
So - is there a way to pull data from a different board?
If not, and specific automations is the only way to go for now, then there’s a bug with this because item creation automations don’t allow creating sub-items.
Inside the automation recipe, in the dialog for setting the fields of the item, sub-items show up but you can only click on it. It says - Expand Subitems / Collapse Subitems, and clicking it a few times just increments the number of subitems written there, but nothing actually happens.
I’d be happy to hear your thoughts!
Thanks,
Nadav.
Hey @nshamgar! Subitems are not currently supported in automations, but our team is working on it. We hope to have this functionality available at the end of Q3, but this is just a tentative timeline
Additionally, the request to include the Checklist feature in automated updates when a new item is created has been shared with our team. At this time, I don’t have any concrete timeline to share for this feature request, but I’d be happy to pass on your support for this!
Hi everyone on this thread - Automatic creation of subitems is now available in Custom Automations - hurrah! I made this demo video clip for another community post and wanted to share it here to help get the word out - Screen Recording 2020-12-10...
We just started using monday.com and the automated subtask creation is a huge part of our workflows. We have around 80 different subtasks that we create as items go from different stages in our workflow. This has been an excellent feature and so glad we got in at the right time to use it.
Would be great if we could add more than 6 subitems per automation! And also being able to add or remove subitems in the automation without literally having to start all over again (changing my automation from having 6 subitems to 5 subitems as an example).
@TaylorTedesco I agree with you on this request,
1 thing that has been helpful for me when adding/removing subitems from automations is to just create a new automation with the new subtask. This saves time but obviously could end up with LOTs of extra automations depending on how often you need to change those things.
@TaylorTedesco We did face some issue with wrong ordering for subitems, in that case what we did was prefix the task with a number, 01, 02, 03 etc… and then just sort by name if order was incorrect. But there is no guarantee for order of automations, so when we automatically created more than 6 tasks, they would get out of order anyway.
And then if you just have to add 1 or 2 sub tasks in between 02 and 03 then you just prefix them with (02a, 02b) and then you can sort to get the order your looking for. Again, I still agree it would be best to chain more than 6 subtask creations on 1 automation but this is a workaround that has worked for us based on current limitation.
Hi @timlittletech
I have the issue of automated subtasks not coming through in the right order. I tried the numbering prefix, but it didn’t change the way they come through, and I can’t see how to sort by Subtask name… I appear to only be able to sort by Main-Task name. Am I missing something? @TaylorTedesco I presume you got this to work?
Thanks!
Hi @katieB
here is a screenshot of the sort by subitems column:
However I also have seen a new app in the app store for subitem templates: https://monday.com/marketplace/104
I haven’t had a chance to try this out, but it may be a better way to automate subitems creation. If you end up using it post back here and let us know how it goes!
Not really unfortunately, my solution was to really dial in the subtasks to trigger off certain status changes. So that only a few were being added at a time. I understand that would not work in a lot of use cases though.
Hi @timlittletech,
I’ve just set up a subitem template using this app, but when I try to use it in an item, it won’t populate.
I’ve come in here to try and figure out what I’m doing wrong - so if you happen to try it, I’ll be keen to hear how you go! Maybe my list of subitems is too long… I’ll keep playing with it and post back here if I figure it out
UPDATE: I tried reducing the number of sub-items in the template and it worked!
26 was too many; 19 was fine - so I’m guessing the limit is 20 subitems
FYI: the app is called ‘Subitem Template’ and it’s one of the ‘view’ options inside an item update (NOT a board view).
Thanks for the video!! Do you happen to know how many times you can use the “create a subitem” within an automation? I have a series of tasks that I need to build out for a realtor under each phase.
