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Can a Trello custom field be global?

liz_t

Is there any way to make a custom field created on one board global, that is available of all boards? The list I am thinking of is not static so I need a to easily update each instance and have not found any way to do this.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thank you

Accepted answers

Iain Dooley

@liz_t you can't create global custom fields in Trello, but any time you move a card from one board to another where a custom field on that card contains a value, the same field will automatically be created on the target board.

This is a blessing and a curse because eventually all boards fill up with all fields if you're moving cards a lot between boards with different fields set, but it also gives you an easy way to ensure your fields are consistent between boards if used judiciously.

All comments

Jack Brickey

just cleaning up my failures.... :-(

Iain Dooley

Jack Brickey

Ugh...banging my head on table. I provided a Jira answer for a Trello question. Wake up and pay attention Jack!

Iain Dooley

@Jack Brickey pretty good answer though

Rebecca Welton_xmcptn

This is THE WORST. Is there any way to get rid of them?!

Thank you Ian.

I also answered my own question- they can be deleted on one board without deleting them on all of the other boards. So that's something.

Iain Dooley

@Rebecca Welton Yes and the biggest issue is that even if the custom fields powerup isn't enabled in a board, the custom fields themselves are still cross-pollinated in the background and copying cards to the board will fail once they hit the limit.

This Trellinator function would delete all the custom fields from a given board:

https://gist.github.com/iaindooley/071106f3bc1bcd1a4620a57cebfa8573

But the way to avoid polluting them in the first place is to use an automation to move cards from one board to another when you're using custom fields, that first copies the card, then clears all the custom field values on the card, optionally links the 2 cards together and moves the copy to the target board/list.

You could do this with Butler for example with a card button:

2020-05-12 at 10.27 am.png

also this is what it would look like in Trellinator if you triggered with a label to copy to another board for example:

https://gist.github.com/iaindooley/82be585cb1bdef7ce1e11a34f3c1212b

You can read more about Trellinator here:

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

Esme Crutchley

Hi @liz_t

Welcome to the Community!

I would also add to @Iain Dooley's answer to point out that there is a limit to the number of Custom Fields you can have on a board.

There is a 50 custom field limit.

So if you have a card on a board with 30 custom fields and you move a card into a board with 40 custom fields, only 10 custom fields from the 30 will be transferred over because there's only 50 allowed.

I found this out quite recently when I was moving cards around from all over the place into one board and my custom fields were disappearing!

To get around this, I have created labels for some of the regular things that I use. E.g. I had a custom field with a drop-down for the schedule (off, working from home, sick, TOIL, training etc) so I made labels for all of those to remove the need for a custom field.

Everything that had a specific set of answers now has labels, anything that's dynamic, like a date, is still a custom field, and I tried to standardise the custom fields across all my boards, because if a custom field says "DUE" and another says "DUE." (one with a full stop and one without), these are two distinct custom fields so they will be treated as such. So I went through my boards and made sure that the date fields were all named the same thing so that they wouldn't import as different ones.

I don't know if that helps at all, but I thought I would mention it.

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