Parent item to show the highest priority of its subitems (without using 'Subitems Priority' field)

[Eitan]

Hi all,
Several of my items have subitems, and others don’t.
I want the Priority field of items with subitems to have the highest priority of any of its subitems, so if, for example, one of the subitems is Critical, its parent item will be Critical.
.
Yes, I can use the ‘Subitems Priority’ field, but then I will need to also use the Priority field for items that DON’T have subitems - having two fields for every item, which is not ideal.

Thanks.

[GCavin (Gilles Cavin - Reinventing Formulas in monday.com)]

Hi Eitan,

Provided you give your statuses a name that can be sorted from highest to lowest priority, you could do it with the Advanced Formula Booster, a 3rd-party app that takes a completely different approach to formulas in monday and therefore revolutionizes the use of formulas in monday.

1. It doesn’t use the Formula Column
2. It can cast its result to any type of columns
3. It has its own syntax editor that allows up to 100 lines
4. It can read and update any item in your boards, not only the current item, but the previous, next, sub, parent, same group, same board, other board items.

Here we are going to use its ability to read other sub-items and to update the parent item.

Here is quick demo (note that the other items do not have sub-items and the status column can be changed as usual, the Status column being a standard Status column).

How did I achieve this?

By creating the following formula in the Sub-item Board:

In the first line, we collect all the statuses of the sub-items and sort them in descending order (that’s what the False parameter of the SORT function is about). So we get a list sorted from highest to lowest priority then we cast the first status of the list (#1) to the Parent’s Status column.

Here is the result of the simulation (you can run a simulation directly from within the app, without affecting your board data):

Then, for the formula to run automatically, you simply need to add 1 automation. Since the Automation Center, at this time, doesn’t allow much options on sub-items, you need to go to the Templates folder and click on Integrations. Here are the detailed steps:

That’s it. Hope it helps!

[Eitan]

Thank you Gilles,
It looks wonderful, but currently I’m looking for a free solution.