When dropdown is selected, add subtasks based on the dropdown

Platform discussions Special workflows & use cases
1

I want to set up an automation so when dropdown’s are selected it automatically adds subitems.

For example, when ‘blog’ and ‘social’ are selected, all of the blog and social subitem tasks are added. Or if just ‘blog’ is selected then only the blog subitems will be added. The only trigger I can find is that when the dropdown ‘changes’.

I’ve set up 3 the automation. One for ‘video’, one for ‘social’, and one for ‘blog’ and set them to if the drop contains those terms, it triggers. The problem is that if ‘blog’ was already selected, and I add ‘social’ but then also readds the subitems from ‘blog’ because the trigger is set to the column changing rather than a specific dropdown being added.

I could make automations for all possible combinations but a) that seems silly, and b) it doesn’t that the fact that if I were to remove one of the trigger terms, the column would’ve changed and therefore the subitems would all be added again.

This is where I’m stuck.

2

Hi Lisa,

One thing you could do is to have additional columns that track if the “template” has been added. So you could have status columns like:

  1. Video Check
  2. Social Check
  3. Blog Check

Each would have the labels: “Not Added” and “Added”.

Then you add the following automation:

When Dropdown changes
And only if contains all [Video]
And Video Check is Not Added

Set Video Check to Added
Create subitem

You’ll need to duplicate this automation for each new option you add, but it’s a decent solution, and one that allows you to manage everything within monday.com.

For something more advanced, you could keep these templates (which may contain multiple subitems) as items in a template group. Then you could have a make.com (3rd party tool) scenario search for the item that matches the dropdown name and copy over all the subitems into your item.

Let me know if that helps!