Functionalities around Invalid dependencies

[Lucas_Falk]

Hi Everyone,

My team and I are planning on migrating our Project Management tool to Airtable. We have more than 2000 tasks, among them ~500 tasks that have a multitude of dependencies. We appreciate the Gantt view showing those dependencies. Unfortunately we have so many dependencies that the dependencies on the Gantt view are hard to digest and to work on, particularly for those that are showing as “invalid”.

Is there a way to extract/highlight invalid dependencies into a separate table, view or even field? Or another solution (e.g. formula) to easily alert and/or track these invalid dependencies other than the red dotted arrows in the Gantt view?
Note that the flowchart app is not meeting our needs: app limited to 100 records, records’ timeline not taken into account, thus no option to highlight invalid dependencies.

Thank you in advance,

Lucas

[Alexey_Gusev]

Hi,
Yes, it’s possible. Dependencies maintained via links. Depending of how your schema built, use formula
example: task 1 start 05 Jan, end 10 Jan. task 2 linked (dependent) on task 1 and set to start 08 Jan (which is wrong, can’t start until task 1 ends). add lookup field (predessor end time), set formula (when start time < lookup time)
Or if your schema is different, use another formula.

[Lucas_Falk]

Hi Alexey,
Thank you for taking the time to answer.
This solution would work for tasks with a single dependency only. When a task has multiple dependencies (and therefore multiple dates appearing in the Lookup field), the formula will return an #ERROR!. Do you know a way around this issue?

[Alexey_Gusev]

Sorry, i don’t use Gantt. My work is usually multi-threading, no dependencies)) So I can’t suggest about logic “how to build formula”, i can just tell about “how to repair”.
You may use rollup instead of lookup to get max/min value, or you can use both in parallel with formula IF({lookup_fld}!=ERROR(), {lookup}, {rollup}), and hide all fields except result.

Also you may try to turn to string with “”&{field} or CONCATENATE() (almost the same), cut some part at beginning or end by LEFT(), RIGHT() and turn back to date.
i didn’t test it, just ideas.

[Lucas_Falk]

Hi Alexey,

Thanks for your input.
At last, I believe Airtable cannot meet my team’s needs when it comes to dependencies.
There might be some ways around the lack of functionalities, but it is not going to be sufficient.