A list aggregating all empty "Doing" lists in other boards

[r0629527]

Hi all,

How would one go about having an overview-board with a list "Not Doing" which scans all other boards for a "Doing" list and when one is found that is empty (indicating I'm currently not doing anything for said project/board) it adds a card with the name of that board to this "Not Doing" list. When something is found then that card is removed again.

An example could be a card called "Learning to Cook" being added to the "Not Doing" list of my overview-board. This would then indicate the "Doing" list in the "Learning to Cook" board is empty. Once I add, for example, a "seasoning basics" card to the "Doing" list the "Learning to Cook" card in the "Not Doing" list in my overview-board is removed.

What I'm able to do through automation is to have other boards create a new, unique, card in the "Not Doing" list on my overview board when it detects an empty list and since I can give the new card any name I want I just give it the name of the board in question. Some drawbacks are that I need to add and configure this rule for each project-board (this does have the advantage that I can easily exclude some project-boards) and that it does not detect when something is added to a "Doing" list, it can only detect when something is removed. So detecting when nothing is being done is possible, but then detecting when something is being done is not yet possible.

[Hannah Humbert - Simpla Workflows · Accepted solution]

@r0629527 welcome to the community 😊 if you wanted to create one rule, you could say something like:

when list "Doing" has exactly 0 cards, create a unique card with title "{boardname}" in list "Not Doing"

And then just enable it on the applicable boards.

For your other question about what happens when a card goes from having 0 cards to one or more, what would be the ideal scenario? Would you want it to archive the card in your overview board? In that case, would something like this work?

when list "Doing" has more than 0 cards, find a card titled "{boardname}" on board "Overview", and archive the card

[r0629527]

This works great Hannah, thank you!

I now learned that there are so called automation variables, like {boardname}, and that you can cascade actions.

The final rules ended up being:

- when list "Doing" has exactly 0 cards, create a unique card with title "{boardname}" at the bottom of list "Not Doing" on board "To Do Or Not To Do"

- when list "Doing" has more than 0 cards, find a card titled "{boardname}" in list "Not Doing" on board "To Do Or Not To Do", and archive the card

[Hannah Humbert - Simpla Workflows]

Great! Glad that's working for you 😊