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Here at Green Llamas we take pride in being an active member of the monday.com communities. Every once and a while we come across a question that requires a creative solution and we’d like to start sharing some with all of you.
Today’s #tiptuesday:
HOW DO I CREATE A LOT OF SUBITEMS VIA AUTOMATION AND KEEP THEM IN THE RIGHT ORDER?
This was brought forward from a client that wanted to create a high number of Onboarding subtasks on the fly when a button is pressed.
Creating subitems via automation is easy, however, a single automation can only (as of now) have 27 steps (I know strange number). This client needed more than 27 subtasks created, so a single automation wont work. We will need to use multiple automations to create all the tasks, however how do we ensure the automations are all in order (as we cannot control the order in which automations are triggered). We also cannot set a saved sort on subitems to a view (each new set of subtasks would need to be sorted manually).
We are still going to utilize multiple automations to create the all the subtasks, but we will also use a hidden status column to control the order in which the tasks are created.
Lets create a new status column which we called (create subs). This status column has 3 options (2nd Batch, 3rd Batch, 4th Batch). We will also hide this column from view and set permissions accordingly.
If you remember, we want the creation triggered on a Button press. So we set our first automation up to create the first 26 subitems, with the last step in the automation to set the (create subs) status column to “2nd Batch”:
We can now use a status change trigger to create the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th batches of subitems by changing the (create subs) status as the last step in each automaton:
We also created a separate “Creation Status” column to let the users know the progress of the task creation as it will take a few minutes to create them all. As the last step we set the Creation Status to Complete.
We also have a single automation to set the status to “In Progress” when it starts:
Using this type of setup we can now create any number of subitems under a single item without hitting automation limitations and everything stays in order 
Of course, this is a specific example but could be applied to a number of combinations!
If you have any questions or would like to learn more feel free to reach out any time!
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Keep those Projects and People Green!
Mark