Subitems Automation (status, dates and values)

[arcenio (Evann Pullan Arcenio)]

Hi,

I would like to ask how to automate subitems. What I want is when the date arrived, all the value and status will be cleared or set to “to do” but I can’t find any automation that says "When this date arrives, the set subitem status to “to do” and delete the values of "“time to complete” and also, change the date to plus 1 month.

[FrancisElliott]

Hi Evann,

Unfortunately, this type of automation isn’t directly possible in monday.com. Imagine that the subitem cannot see the parent item—this is how monday.com automations are configured.

There are a couple of things you can do to resolve this:

1. Store the date on a subitem level and use that as the trigger.
2. Create a connection (one way) from the subitem to the parent and make sure the subitem is always linked to the parent. Then you can use mirror columns from the parent as triggers. (you can use make.com/Zapier to do this)
3. Use parent items only and find another way to group these data. Perhaps you could store that subitem data as columns just as effectively.
4. Instead of using old items and reseting constantly, perhaps you could create new items each time or duplicate from something like a template item. Then with views etc. you could always filter out old items. This would also give you a record of old data.

Just some general ideas about how you could approach working around this restriction. I agree it would be nice to have subitems link to parents either by default or via a native option.

Best of luck!
Francis

[Fantasy-Media-Team]

Hey @arcenio,

We developed an app called subitem automations that provides robust automation capabilities to subitems. Here’s an example of how it can be applied in this case →

You can find it in the monday.com marketplace in the platform or here - monday.com: Apps Marketplace

Hope that helps!

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

HI Evann,

This is something easy to do with the Advanced Formula Booster, the 3rd-party app that revolutionizes formulas in monday.com.

If I understand correctly, the date is at the Parent item level, but you want columns to be modified at the sub-item level, right? Plus you want all sub-items to be modified at once, ie. you want all of them to have a Status of “To-do” and a blank “Time To Complete”.

The Advanced Formula Booster has many unique features. For your scenario, these are the 3 that counts:

• it does not use the Formula column, but rather can cast its results to any type of columns
• it has its own syntax editor, allowing you to write up to 100 instructions
• its formulas may update multiple columns at once.

These are the 3 features you need for this automation.

When you design your formula in Advanced Formula Booster, you have access to columns from the current item, but also to many other items. In this case, you would go to the Sub tab to access the columns of the sub-items.

and then you would write this formula:

With this 2 simple instructions, you are setting the Status of all sub-items to “To-do” and blanking out their “Time to complete” column. No matter the number of sub-items.

Once your formula is created, you simply create an automation: When Date Arrives, run the Formula. That’s all there is to it!