Snapshotting items including mirrored column and formula values

Context:

  • We have a home-rolled portfolio board which links to all of our project plans, RAID logs, deliverables trackers, and budget trackers.
  • Each project has its own version of each of these boards, so 5 boards per project.
  • We have 20+ projects per year per portfolio.

Use Case:

  • We need to keep track of the state of each project at completion for KPIs and metrics (e.g., avg. project duration by product, avg. project duration over time, etc.)

Problem:

  • We cannot keep all of the projects active on our portfolio board due to monday’s limitation on the number of connected boards/items.
  • I have tried to implement an automation to “snapshot” each item at completion by creating a new item in a different board however it’s not possible to use the value(s) of mirrored and formula fields in these automations.
  • In lieu of monday being able to support effectively an unlimited number of linked boards & items, we need a way to “snapshot” the project’s state at completion and “save” it somewhere else for dashboards & reports.

Desired Solution:

It would be amazing to have an automation which enables the current view of an item to be created as a new item somewhere else. In practice, I see this working as follows:

  • Mirrored Text/Long Text columns would become a Text/Long Text column with the current value of the mirrored field
  • Mirrored Timeline columns would become a Timeline column with the Start Date being the minimum value of the mirrored items’ timelines and the End Date being the maximum value of the mirrored items’ timelines
  • Mirrored Date columns would become a Date column with the value being set based on the chosen aggregation for the mirror column (Min/Max)
  • Mirrored Status columns would become a Status column when they have one linked item. When they have multiple linked items, they would need to become some new type of column similar to a Progress column, but supporting multiple colours/values stacked
  • Formula fields that produce a number would become a Number field with the formula’s current value
  • Formula fields that produce a date would become a Date field with the formula’s current value
  • Formula fields that produce non-numeric, non-date values would become a Text field with the formula’s current value