Custom Fields feature request: Mandatory Fields

[Massimiliano Traversari]

Hi,

i'd like to be capable of setting some Custom Fields as mandatory. If they are not set to any value, it should generate an alert (even a custom red label on the card would be fine) and highlight missing required fields.

I know I can make Butler automations to get to a similar result (the red label if some fields are not filled), but if there are many required Custom Fields on a card it would be a mess, writing a lot of repetitive Butler automations to check all of them (because in Butler I cannot use AND or OR operators in a trigger - and this could be another feature request :-) )

Have a nice day you all

[Allen -Amazing PowerUps-]

You can do this with the Amazing Fields powerup.  It is even one of the Example Fields that many people use.

The idea is that you create a field and then set up a dynamic coloring rule on the field to color the background red if it is empty.  (for text fields this means equal to "", for numbers equal to 0.0, etc)

Depending upon what you want to do you could even set it up to do some calculations on the value or check if the value is one of a given set of potential good values.  Lots of flexibility in there.

[Massimiliano Traversari]

Thank you @Allen -Amazing PowerUps- ,

I already stumbled upon this powerup by checking forums some days ago, to find a solution to my Custom Fields problem. It seems to be a really useful powerup.

**Unfortunately** my boss does not like the idea of introducing third party powerups because of them requiring permissions on our enterprise boards :-(

[Allen -Amazing PowerUps-]

Understood.  I wish there was a way to have more fine grained permissions for powerups.  If you end up still wanting to use Amazing Fields, followup through the powerup support channel and I may be able to help assuage your company's concerns about using a powerup.

[Brittany Joiner]

As Allen mentioned, i think Amazing Fields would be the way to go, but i also understand not wanting to add third party power-ups and limitations there. 

The best I have been able to find with native Trello custom fields and "mandatory" is some automation. For instance, if you want to require a field to be filled out before a card is moved to a specific list, you could create a rule that says if a card moves into x list and the y custom field is blank/cleared, move the card back to the list and create a comment that tags the user who triggered the action to update that field before moving the card. 

Something like this:

Here it is in action:

I actually might make a video of this, cause I know it's not perfect, but hopefully a decent workaround.

[Massimiliano Traversari]

Hi @Brittany Joiner ,

thank you for your response, I really appreciated the quick visual tutorial.

I actually use that tecnique in other boards, but those ones that I'm working on at the moment contain a lot of mandatory fields. In this case I have to create a lot of automations, because in Butler we cannot make triggers like

"When a card with custom field X OR Y OR Z cleared is added to......."

Maybe I should better request this feature (logic operators) instead :-)

But I think that I will follow the path you suggested, given that I can't use third party powerups.

Thank you

[Brittany Joiner]

@Massimiliano Traversari yeah Trello definitely does get tricky when there's ORs - i also agree that would be a great feature. 

Sometimes @milynnus can help me come up with OR workarounds using regex, though, and i actually think Custom Fields could be one... something like this

But that doesn't seem to work. @milynnus any ideas?

[milynnus]

@Massimiliano Traversari @Brittany Joiner 

This seems to work for me. Comment is post when (1) either is cleared or (2) both are cleared. Both name and mobile CF are text fields in my test case.

when a card with custom field "regex:/.*(Name|Mobile).*/" cleared is added to list "Doing", post comment "Pass"

[Brittany Joiner]

@milynnus ah wondering what i was doing wrong with it on my end! you know, i renamed the fields to make them shorter and easier to put in regex and i wonder if there was some race condition where Butler didn't realize the new names. 

so yeah @Massimiliano Traversari that should work then!! will be one long block but you could do that in one rule!

[Brittany Joiner]

@milynnus can you share a screenshare of it working for you? I've been racking my brain around it and i still can't make it work: here's a screen share of me trying if you can spot what I'm missing here:  https://www.loom.com/share/47fdb6d386ae4d6fb97ac9563e585319

I'm even logging the values of the fields to show that at least one is empty, but its like it just doesn't trigger unless both fields are empty.

[milynnus]

@Brittany Joiner It might be a case of the literal meaning of "clear" aka there was a previous value in it. When working with webhooks, there is always the old data sent to the webhook.

[milynnus]

@Brittany Joiner 

The log showing the change to the CF and the subsequent write to comment. What I am noticing the long delay...the Pass was a few seconds, the move was 1 minute ago

[Brittany Joiner]

@milynnus i dont think it's that because it does work if the one field was never set then cleared, i think its just not understanding the regex. I also tried 

>when a card without custom field "regex:/.*(Name|Mobile).*/" set is added to list "Doing", move the card to the top of list "To Do", and add the purple label to the card

So i don't think its the command, i think its just not happy with the regex for custom fields

[Brittany Joiner]

@milynnus interesting. i do think its a bit slower, and seems to be slowing down the more i play with it haha, we are wearing Butler out tonight 😂

But it still seems after a minute it doesn't do it, or it will execute something else on my board, so i don't think the problem on my end is a delay. I think there's either something wrong with my regex or it wont register it. I even tried a hacky sort of way where whenever a card was created it would set the value of those fields to "Default" and then I changed the command to trigger if Name or Mobile was set to "Default" and that worked if Name was "Default", but if Name was another value and Mobile was "Default", it did not trigger, so its not looking at anything after my pipe

[Brittany Joiner]

@milynnus in the screenshot you showed, were both fields empty? or just one?

[milynnus]

@Brittany Joiner 

These ar some of the scenarios I have tested

1. Old card with both fields not set previously
2. Set one field but not the other
3. Set both fields - no comments posted
4. Remove on the previously set field

All test cases met expected results.

Regex is not a supported feature. From programming perspective, unless someone removes the code, the above seems to be what is needed by the requester.

[Brittany Joiner]

@milynnus right, but it's not working on my end so something is off haha. 

in scenarios 1, 2, and 4, it posted a comment every time? and in scenario 2 - which field was the one not updated? Because i can make scenario 2 be triggered if the first field is not set, but other field is. However scenario 2 doesn't trigger if the first is set and the second one is not.

Lol @Massimiliano Traversari maybe you should try it and see if you can break the tie 😂 Fingers crossed it works for you and I'm just somehow overcomplicating it or completely missing something on my end.

[milynnus]

@Brittany Joiner 

https://somup.com/c3irfIuTQK

[Brittany Joiner]

@milynnus im truly baffled. why on earth would the exact same command not work for me? this is gonna keep me up all night 😂

[Brittany Joiner]

@milynnus sorry one more thing - then i'll stop bothering you. can you send me a screenshot of the rule config in butler, like what it looks like on your screen here? 

[milynnus]

@Brittany Joiner 

[Massimiliano Traversari]

Good morning,

wow I didn't check this post for half a day, yesterday, and this mornig I found a lot of messages.

Thank you guys! I didn't even know I could use regexp in Butler, this was reeeeeeally enlightening to me.

@Brittany Joiner I tried @milynnus rule config on 3 custom fields in my board, but I had some strange issues too. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not.

I made three fields: location, colour, number_of_people

milynnus code worked in these cases:

• all fields empty
• colour field set only
• number_of_people set only
• colour and number_of_people set

but it didn't work in these:

• location set only - in this case the card was not moved back to To Do

I thought it could be caused by the "custom field cleared", as milynnus stated in a comment. So I changed my rule config to:

and now it's working fine for me, doing the job.

@milynnus still I can't understand why your config works for you and not for me, but your advice put me on the right way. Thanks

Thank you all so much, your help and your dedicated time was really precious. <3

[Brittany Joiner]

@Massimiliano Traversari yes!! that actaully works for me. for some reason i thought that completed only worked on checkbox fields, but that one works for me! woohoo! glad we could figure this out! it actually inspired me to make a video about this since I see this question a lot 

[Brittany Joiner]

Video here in case anyone finds this later and wants a three minutes summary instead of reading through our whole chain 😂