Create and link in one action

Was there any progress with this?

Feels a bit painful to have to click into every task and set the relation when creating from a rich text editor.

In the end, we created a separate table view for each entity, that was filtered to only contained “orphaned” tasks (e.g. one’s without a relation set).

Here’s a little tip that can be used to speed up creation and linking of entities.

Imagine that you have Projects, which are linked to multiple Tasks. You want to create a Task and simultaneously link it to a Project.

You can add a symbols and extra text in the naming of the Task to indicate which project you want to link it to.
In my example, I want to create a Task called ‘Task 1’ and link it to an already existing Project called ‘Project A’. To do so, I type the name of the Task as “Task 1>Project A”.

Behind the scenes…
I have a couple of automations.
The first extracts the text to the right hand side of the arrow symbol and stores it in a text field called ‘Right hand side’:


The formula is as follows:
Middle([Step 1 Task].Name,Find([Step 1 Task].Name,">") + 1,999)

Then I have an automation that uses this information to find the corresponding Project to which the task should be linked, and then removes the extra text from the name:

The formulas are as follows:
Projects.Filter(Name = [Step 1 Task].[Right hand side]).Sort().First()
and
Left([Step 1 Task].Name,Find([Step 1 Task].Name,">") - 1)

The result of this is the following behaviour:
When, for example, I want to create Task 1 for a Client - I can automatically assign it to Project A without needing to follow the normal flow of create, open and edit:
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The same behaviour occurs if you create a Task inline from within a rich-text field.
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Hi Chris, this is an interesting solution.

I’m playing around with this at the moment, so will let you know how I get on.

Thanks, L

Related: Make "creation context" available to scripts - #3 by Matt_Blais

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