Cascade Custom Field "Value" from Folders/Projects to Sub Projects/Folders/Tasks

If we had a custom field that would cascade down it's VALUE to child tasks/sub-folders/projects, that would solve a few key challenges we run into.

Perhaps it's adding a Boolean setting called "cascade value" and then which items it cascades to is dependent upon what's been determined in the "Apply to:" section, just below that.

Here's a screenshot of the settings idea.

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Status: Not planned

Comments

Evan Swanson

Creative solution suggestion!

Tim Schoffelman

As a safety measure, you could probably run a quick check to see if that "value" is going to overwrite any existing custom field values. If there are ones that exist, give the user the option to continue or abort the change. Maybe adding a message to have them consider creating a new custom field value and then discontinue the use of the old one.

Food for thought anyways.

Eirik Kvilstad Heskja

Love it!

Actually started a similar post a few days ago (sorry for not searching properly).

Robert Bridgham

Definitely needed!

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Hey guys, thanks for your feedback, our Product team is made aware of it. I'll get back to you when there's an update.

@Eirik I hope you don't mind that I closed your similar suggestion for comments, so that all the feedback is in one place 🙌

Jonathan Beltran

This would be very help and powerful.

Al Sape

Fully agreed. You could then do things like set up the first field as "SUV's" or "sedans" and then choose based on the first choice, like "Forerunner" or "Rav4" etc. You could then report on all SUV's or all Cars, as well as the individual types in each subgroup.

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Hi everyone! The team considers researching this, and I'll be changing the status here when they firmly decide on it. Thank you for your feedback!

Megan McCafferty

The inability to inherit custom field data is a huge roadblock for us. The duplicate data entry across parent/child is prone to error and makes our reports inaccurate and therefore meaningless. When users cannot trust that the data is correct, they are reluctant to use/rely on the new system. This is wreaking havoc on our Wrike utilization figures.

Claudio Carbone

Hey everybody this is a +1 for me: takes me an intolerable amount of time to manually go through custom fields, so please automate these things

Laura Boylan

If you have access to Wrike Integrate (paid add-on), it's possible to automatically copy the value from a project-level custom field (i.e., Client) to all new tasks created within that project.

I posted an example community recipe at https://www.workato.com/recipes/1102960, with a fuller explanation in the Best Practices section at /hc/en-us/community/posts/360039414333.

Terje Agard

This would be great. Is it possible to duplicate the data that is added in a reqest (only the custum field) to all the subtask thats generated with a blueprint. It would help a lot.

Sam Hersee

This is a powerful feature I would love.

Zoho Projects has something like this for the prefix of tasks within a project, but it's narrowly used for that purpose. It's not a feature you can implement on custom fields the user creates.

To avoid the "overwrite" problem Tim described... I envision something similar to how wrike shows a dual-value in a custom field, for the Sum vs. the Entered value (the field can show both the sum AND the value manually put into that field, side-by-side). The "cascade value" would be distinct from the "entered value". However, they'd be regarded as the same for reporting purposes.

Picture of zoho's task prefix field

Permanently deleted user

Hey everyone, thank you for all of your feedback! It has been passed on to our Product team. I don't have a request for you at the moment, but as soon as I have one, I'll let you know 😊

Jose Ricce

This would great feature. I am really interested in.

Christina Fischer

Hi guys,

we have a use case where teams are working on just a few task out of all project task. Projects are automatically created using an API (REST, data incoming from external systems) and the custom fields are filled at project level automatically.

On project level, the custom field contains a value about a business discipline (string value). This value should cascade down to the project tasks (if we define this, as Tim originally proposed in 2018) so that the team working on only some tasks (and only seeing these in their dashboard) will be able to filter based on business discipline.

Current solution/ potential business impact of "cascade-down" feature: Copy and paste value by hand has a high risk of human error, low data quality if one or more fields are not copied or copy/paste is done too late, and it hinders mid-management level employees from doing meaningful work instead of this repetitive work. This is impacting approx. 200 - 500 employees (out of more than 12.000 users) worldwide in our account alone.

Another use case is that the custom field values are needed for further work progress on task-level and in this case, the employees have access to the project as well. Still the situation is the same that these values have to be copied and pasted manually right now. This impacts another approx. 300 - 400 employees worldwide.

We'd really appreciate if this could be taken up soon for development.

We see this is a needed feature for big enterprise customers such as us and will positively benefit all customers who work with big amounts of data (custom fields) in their projects.

Permanently deleted user

Hi @Christina Fischer! Thank you for sharing these use cases with us. They've been passed on to the Product team.

I don't have an update for you at the moment, but as soon as I do, I'll be sure to keep you posted. Let me know if you have any other questions / feedback.

Robert Bridgham

Instead of a push of the custom field down into subordinate tasks or subtasks, you could place the custom field into a unique variable and expose the variable to the users so we can then reference $custfieldXXXX in our templates to inherit the data.

Jem Wolfenden

Hi,

custom field value inheritance, from parent project to child project/task, would save on a huge amount of duplication of effort and human error, and would allow for a single source of truth to be very transparent. Are there any updates from the Product team?

Tuomo Suominen

2018, November 02 - this thread is started
2019, March 11 - "our Product team is made aware of it. I'll get back to you when there's an update."
2020, February 05 - "The team considers researching this, and I'll be changing the status here when they firmly decide on it."
2021, March 25 - @Elizaveta Bogdanova: very quiet here. Did the team decide not to research this, and that's why the status is "Backburner"?

Bhavya (Malhotra) Goins

^ need this feature. Without it, it takes away the efficiency from Wrike! Trying to use intake forms --> create a project with dependancies, but people can't see the details in the custom fields that they need to review in order to complete tasks! Can we get an update on this?

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Hey @Tuomo Suominen, @Bhavya (Malhotra) Goins, thank you for bumping this thread!

I'm checking with the team right now, and I'll let you know if I get an update from them.

Joesph Hoffmann

Cross-posting here because it looks like this same topic is being discussed in multiple locations.

Do you have linked data for custom field inheritance on your road map? We often use nested projects and tasks to organize projects and separate work for teams. Ideally, we would have the option to toggle an “inherit value from parent” switch for a given custom field if the parent has that same field.

Currently we can inherit fields, but the values can’t be linked. We have two choices, leave the values blank on the nested project/task and refer to the parent for data, or enter the value again.

Option 1: Copy data from the parent into duplicated inherited fields. If we enter the value again, it creates extra work and a probable point of data inconsistency. We started doing this initially, but quickly abandoned it for option 2 because, inevitably, someone would update a value in one place but not update it in all the other “inherited” projects/tasks. We want to be able to update field data in one place and have it propagate.
Option 2: Leave duplicated inherited fields blank. If we leave it blank it forces people to leave the current task to get relevant data. This causes some confusion and also causes issues if a task is assigned to someone that doesn’t have access to the entire project scope.

For example, we might be working on a course project. The customer information, course name, URL, semester info would be the same for every sub-project and task for that project. It would be nice to have easy access to that information w/o having to make duplicate copies of the data or having to navigate back up to the top-level project to get information.

The ability to set linked custom field values would be extremely helpful!

Dustin Beaty

@Elizaveta Bogdanova

Could we get an update on this one? It looks like you went to check with the team and then never heard anything back. As someone that has just brought their company onboard today, we found that this exact situation was something that was problematic and could also resolve a few uses brought up in our team discussions.

I do see how others are left wondering what happened here as having the ability to make a field a common item or push the data down to subtasks, etc. would be a core functionality or what makes a custom field so useful.

Like what use do I have for a field that is field with something when a form is filled out or selected upon project creation and then a subtask does not show that piece of information to a team member?!

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Thank you for reaching out @Dustin Beaty! Indeed, I'm waiting on info in relation to potential updates for this request and I'm sorry it's taking me some time to get. I will let you know as soon as I hear back from the team!

Huib van Erp

We would love this feature! Please update it soon, we would save a lot of time. Thank you in advance.

Christina Fischer

@Elizaveta Bogdanova Any updates? We're anxiously waiting for this development 😀

Dustin Beaty

@Christina Fischer @Elizaveta Bogdanova

So true!! I really don't understand, how there can be so many votes and so many comments on things and they just keep getting back-burner status! Like when you sort the feedback by votes, there are so many items that have tons of votes on them and back-burner...

Cansu Yetisgin

Hello everyone, I hope you don't mind me jumping in here for Lisa 😊

Thank you for your continuous support and input here, we really appreciate it. We've spoken with our team on this suggestion and for now, this remains 'Backburner'. Although this may sound like a relatively simple thing to implement this update is more complex than it looks on the surface and due to other priorities, this isn't something the team can work on right now. I know this won't be the news you were hoping for, but the team is still interested in this idea, and although it won't be added to the short-term roadmap, there is potential that this will be rolled out in the future.

We receive many great suggestions here on the Community and we'd love to be able to deliver all the ideas shared here, however, this simply isn't possible. The number of votes and the input from Community members play a key role in helping the team to assess the popularity of a suggestion. This Community article details how we work with Product feedback and gives background on how the team considers all available data as well as user feedback, to help them to determine what to focus on next.

Once again, thanks for all the support with this suggestion. We will keep you up to date on any news/updates here as we have it.

Amanda Juneau

This is a great idea and would solve quite a few headaches that we have for reporting. We need to report on end customer and billable customer on some of our tasks and being able to cascade fields values downwards into tasks would be a huge help! Any progress on this on?

Sean Gilbertson

Hi Laura,

Your examples here have been super helpful to me as I am working on implementing something like this currently. However, after Wrike updated their community section, the links are no longer working. I know this isn't your fault, but would you be kind enough to update the links for me so I can find these again? (I've spent the past half hour trying to find them via the search function, but to no avail.) Thank you!