How can I search custom fields information in archived cards?

Question

Custom fields allow me to have a better visual control of the process. Nonetheless, when cards are archived and I want to search for a particular custom field I get no return from the search.

E.g.

Custom Field: Client

Custom Field text: "Name of client"

If I search "Name of client" nothing appears

Antonio Panea · Accepted Answer

Hi @Rober ,

I would recommend to create a list in your board for the "archived" ones and leave them there. Otherwise unless you are looking for the name of the card they will not show up.

Other option could be creating a board with your "archived" and move them there instead of archive them. Do not forget to create the same Custom Fields in both boards otherwise you will miss the information!

Good Luck

Cheers

Toni

Iain Dooley · Accepted Answer

@Rober yes it's a bit of a shame that custom fields are not searchable, they're only filterable (ie. they only work with the "search in board" feature that used to be called filtering).

As @Antonio Panea mentioned one option is to keep an archive board of all your historical cards. You can even have multiple historical boards, broken down by month/week etc. depending on the volume of cards you have.

It still diminishes the utility of it though, because you'd have to know which board to look in, and if you have thousands of cards on a single board it'll slow down pretty quickly.

Another option would be to have a trigger that appends all custom field values at the time your card is archived to the description of the card, something like:

The trouble with this approach obviously is that you would need to manually update your Butler command whenever you changed the custom fields, and you would have to create a separate Butler command customised for the custom fields on each board, and if you forgot, you would lose that data.

This Trellinator function would automatically append the key/value pairs for all custom fields on the board to the description of any archived card:

https://gist.github.com/iaindooley/1546fa0eef1d17ae141a082126934a36

If you added this as a listener for "all board" via BenkoBot, then this would be the most "set and forget" solution because it would provide you with an automated search index for all your cards, on any board you're a member of, regardless of the Custom Field structure:

https://app.benkobot.com/

You could even do a one off retroactive import by unarchiving cards from one board, moving them to another board and then archiving them again to trigger the notification by running this Trellinator function via the BenkoBot adhoc interface:

https://gist.github.com/iaindooley/0e3bef8e8b665a9edbeb730d654a5c84

Depending on how many cards you have, you might have to run that a few times, you can save it as an adhoc command and edit the board name, too so you can re-run it across a bunch of different boards to create your indexes as a one-off.