Rules are available on Asana Starter, Advanced, Enterprise, and Enterprise+ tiers, as well as legacy tiers Premium, Business, and Legacy Enterprise.
Rules, much like custom fields, are editable by other members of the project by default. Rules that multi-home tasks into other projects are also visible from the customize menu. These rules can be paused directly from their project. This article covers rule permissions, including who can enable, disable and trigger rules.
Important notes on rule permissions
- You can allow others with edit access the ability to edit rules. Rules that are created will default to editable.
- Only the owner of a rule can delete a rule.
- When updating rules on projects and templates, the editor must have the correct permissions to save all of the rules. For example, if the rule adds tasks to another project, then the editor must also have edit permissions in that other project.
- When a rule is duplicated via project duplication, the duplicating user becomes the owner with insufficient privileges. In this instance, the rule is disabled, but the owner still has editing access.
- Rules are designed to keep running even when the owner's access control permissions change. For example, if a rule is set up to add tasks to a project and you later lose access to that project, the rule will continue to run.
- When a rule is copied or duplicated via project templates (new and legacy versions), the template user will become the rule owner. Here, the rule will only be disabled if the template duplicator has insufficient access control permissions for the rule. For example, you cannot edit a project to which the rule wants to add tasks.
- If a user leaves a project, the rule will not break. However, if there are no other users interacting with the project the rule will be disabled.
Who can enable or disable a rule?
Any user with edit access to a project in which a rule is running will be able to enable or disable a rule created by someone else.
- Users with edit access are also the only ones that can view the change history.
- A user with edit access can pause or activate a rule but only the owner can edit a rule's triggers and actions.
- The rule owner is still the only person that can edit or delete a rule.
When a rule owner leaves Asana
When you deprovision someone who has rules, their rule will be paused and ownership of any rules on projects will be passed to the project owner.
If there is no project owner, ownership will be passed to the admin who deprovisioned the user. Only the new owner of a rule can re-activate the rule to have it continue running.
When a rule owner is deactivated and the new owner has sufficient permissions, this means that the rule will continue to run which the new owner will then be able to edit.
Triggering rules
You can trigger a rule from anywhere (web, mobile, external integrations). If you update something on a task, we check to see if that task is in any projects with rules, and if your action is the trigger on any of those rules. Anyone can trigger a rule, including guests.
Projects you don't have access to
You can trigger rules on projects that you don’t have access to, but the yellow lightning bolt icon will not be displayed to indicate that a rule is running.
Guest permissions
Guests cannot create or own rules, but they can trigger rules.