API and Webhooks

David L_ West

I like Trello but ran into the same "gotcha" everybody else does: no meaningful support for recurring tasks. Card Repeater doesn't cut it. So I was really excited when I found the API and Webhooks. Wow, the possibilities are endless! So I start coding. 

Not so fast, say the gods. While the API is clean and works well, it doesn't provide access to the full set of properties of Trello boards, lists and cards. In fact it seems like there are more things I *can't* touch than things I can. I can't turn 'Watch' on or off? The heck you say.

My question for the community and any Atlassians that read this: is this really how it is and how it's going to be? Is there going to be or has there been any evolution of the API? I could do some really amazing stuff if the API would let me do the things I (I think quite reasonably) expect an API to do. Will it someday?

UPDATE: Watch is apparently Subscribe from the API's POV. Tested and works. That said, Location doesn't appear to be anywhere in the API and I expect I'll keep finding things that are in Trello boards/cards/lists but can't be get/set via the API, so my question holds.

David L_ West

Consider this board, "Do The Things." I record what I have for Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner in the cards while they are in Do Today, and once I'm done eating, I drag them into "Done Today" where a rule marks them as complete. I'd like it to also un-Watch them, but neither Automation nor the API can do that. Oh well.

Then at 0130 every morning, "Done Today" gets renamed to that day's date and a fresh "Done Today" is created. Eventually, I'd probably like to move those to a "Did Today" board and have a master list of all my meals from all my boards. But ok, that's a little pie (heh) in the sky.

My initial idea was to have my daily (or someday, weekly/monthly as well) tasks listed in "Daily Task Repeaters" and have code that copied them with any attributes intact, just modify the dates, set them to uncompleted, clear watch status, etc. But nope, no such luck with the API.

This is just to add context to my question above. I'm head-scratching about how to implement Trello with the API as it is, but it makes me grumpy that I have to.