Accepted Solutions
I enjoy being told something can’t be done, because it encourages me to find a way to do it. :slightly_smiling_face: In this case, it’s definitely possible. Granted, this only works when your parent-child tasks only go a single layer deep—i.e. you can’t have a single task be both a parent and a child—but if a single-level hierarchy is what you’ve got, this will work.
Here’s my starting point. I’ve got two parent tasks, {Task 1} and {Task 3}, with children scattered at various places in the list.
I added a formula field named {Task Group} using this formula:
IF({Parent Task}, {Parent Task}, Name)
If any task has a parent, its group will be that parent. If a task has no parent, that means that it’s a parent of other tasks, so its own name should be the group name.
Now you can make a view that groups by the {Task Group} field, and you end up with this (trimmed for brevity):
In this case, all of my child tasks were added below the parent task, which meant that the parent task would automatically appear at the top of each group. However, I also added a sort to the {Parent Task} field, which will take care of any admittedly-rare cases where a child appears in the record list before its parent. With that done, you can hide the {Task Group} field to keep things clear.
Will that work for your needs?
Thanks for sticking with me and for taking up the challenge! This is a clever approach and you have taught me a good trick here that I will surely use. I am learning myself that I have to stop saying to myself, “Oh, well, Airtable just can’t do this” because I’ve now been wrong again and again.
I may be wrong again – I’d be tickled if you come back and take your suggestions one step further – but that said, I’m afraid this improved suggestion still doesn’t quite do what I’m trying to do. At least, it’s less than ideal.
As I said, I would really like to be able to do two things:
- Hide the subtask records, yet
- See the subtasks
Your last suggestion would allow me to do #1 (hide the subtasks) because your clever formula does allow me to identify which tasks are children and which parents. Alas, unless I’m missing something, your suggestion still does NOT allow me to do #2 (see the subtasks). I want to eat my cake and have it too, and at moment it still looks like I can’t.
What I want to see is just the first row below (well, that, and the fifth row about calling Ozzy, which is a parent task that has no children).
Here I can see the subtasks in the linked field. And where there are subtasks as with row 1, I can of course identify that rec as a parent. But
- I do not see a way to identify recs 2, 3 and 4 as children, at least not automatically
- I also do not see a way to identify rec 5 (“call Ozzy about lawn”) as a parent, because it doesn’t have any children.
Still this is a very instructive thread for me thanks both to you and to @kuovonne. Thanks again.
William
Unless I’m misunderstanding something about what you want to do, my solution above gives you both. The top task in each group is the parent task, and the tasks below it are its subtasks. Here’s the same setup using the task names from your example:
As I recommended initially, this has each subtask linked to its parent task, whereas your screenshot has the parent task linked to all subtasks.
If you really want to, you could use a similar formula:
IF({Parent Task}, "Subtask", "Parent Task")
To identify the type of each task:
From there you could make a different view that only shows parent tasks (if desired) by using a filter on the {Task Type} field to only show those records marked “Parent Task.”
