Butler Automation for Setting Staged Due Dates

[Nate Brock]

I am currently using Trello to manage custom CAD/CAM manufacturing orders. I've been able to dramatically reduce the amount of manual entry for cases using butler and some other 3rd party automation software. One thing I'm still struggling with is setting staged due dates, so I thought I'd ask you guys. The best way I've come up with to see our staged due dates is having custom fields for each one and then setting the Card due date to the next custom date as it gets moved along the lists. We start with the "ship to customer" date, subtract 2 working days for the "finishing" date, subtract another 2 for "Manufacturing" date, and yet another 2 for "CAD Design" date. I would like to set 1 of those dates and have butler extrapolate the others. I found how to set the card due date based on a custom date field +- working days, but not the option to set custom field date based off another date +- days. In the butler documentation it shows some potential solution by directly coding the butler rule with arithmetic expressions but I can't find anywhere that those expressions can be manually entered. Thank you for any help! Sorry if this has been answered, I promise I looked haha!

[Iain Dooley · Accepted solution]

@Nate Brock Yes I think you're correct. I can't see any options in the Butler Power Up for setting a date custom field value relative to a due date set on a card. This used to be a feature of the Butler Bot.

While you're waiting for the power up feature set to catch up with the former capabilities of the bot, you can use Trellinator to do this type of thing directly via the API. Here is the code to set custom field values based on an offset from an added due date:

https://gist.github.com/iaindooley/3b5bd2fdd8f327fa8fe750e82bd6d587

Trellinator just runs as a "bot" user, similar to how Butler used to work, so you can use Trellinator commands in conjunction with Butler commands with no hassle.

You can see how to setup/install Trellinator here:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Marketplace-Apps-articles/Introducing-Trellinator-Automate-Trello-with-Google-Apps-Script/ba-p/925271

[Nate Brock]

This is awesome! Thank you so much! I hadn't seen the Trellinator bot yet. I'll be messing around with this all weekend.

[Iain Dooley]

@Nate Brock Cool yeah I only really started promoting it at the end of last year. I wrote it to port a bunch of Butler Bot commands over to so the syntax should be quite "Butler like". Debugging it can take some getting used to though, let me know how you go 

[Thibault Molleman]

@Iain Dooley how's the situation with the butler power up now, would this be doable with the powerup?

[Iain Dooley]

@Thibault Molleman Not sure man I'm not really keeping tabs on it, try it out and let us know!