Can I prevent custom fields from being added to another members board?

[Mary Jean Gloudeman]

We have a number of boards where we created very specific custom fields for that board.  When a card is moved to another board or a card is copied and moved to another board, the custom fields that were a part of the board that it was created on get added on to the other board.  Is there a good way to prevent the custom fields from ending up on another member's board when we are sharing cards?  

[Iain Dooley · Accepted solution]

@Mary Jean Gloudeman the custom fields will only be copied if the card moved has values set for those fields. One option therefore is to use a Butler command (like trigger when adding a label) to move the card to another board which first sets the fields to some blank value so that when the card moves to the other board they are empty. Of course this means if you move the card back to the original board those values won't be present any more either.

[Mary Jean Gloudeman]

@Iain Dooley thank you for the suggestion!  I tested this out. It's true, if you clear the contents of the custom field and then move, or copy and move, the card, the custom fields on the board that receives the card remain unchanged.  However, this doesn't really solve my problem because I need the original custom field dates to remain on the original board.  I experimented with the order of the command setup, where I had Butler perform the card copy first and then cleared the custom fields.  Since any command after the card copy command seemed to effect the copy, I thought this would help.  What happened was this kept the custom field dates on the original card, however, even though the "new" copy of the card had the dates cleared in the custom field, the custom fields still became a usable custom field on the "new" board.  I'm finding that I need to 1) create a copy of the card in the same board, 2) clear the custom fields in that "new" copy, and 3) move that "new" card to another board. 

I also tried adding a checklist item that i could convert to a card.  It seems that Butler could not be used to convert the checklist item to a card that I could see.  Is that true? I also require that the card name has to be kept the same and carry over to the new card.  When you convert a checklist item to a card, the new card takes on the name of the checklist item.  I couldn't find a butler action that would retrieve the {cardname} from the original card to use on the card that was created by convert checklist item.  If I could use the variable {cardname} within the checklist to name the checklist item, then that might be an option for me.  Can you use variables with a checklist?

[Iain Dooley]

@Mary Jean Gloudeman yep if you want to preserve values and prevent fields from being created on the next board, you will need to create a local copy then clear the fields on it then move it to the other board.

Yes you can use variables with a checklist, you can convert checklist items into cards (or at least you used to be able to, not sure with the power up, I know that the power up still has the command to convert all checklist items from a given checklist into cards). When you convert you can say "convert into linked cards" which will link the created card back to the parent, and you can also set the name of the converted cards with the "with pattern" clause if memory serves.

So yes, you should be able to do what you want to do with Butler :)

This Trellinator code would also do the same:

https://gist.github.com/iaindooley/9f9ceab4e47736e8ccb19076b1a894a7

[Mary Jean Gloudeman]

Butler does have that convert to linked cards, I believe I didn't see it at first because there is a slide bar that can be moved to Advanced.