History for start and due date
Hi,
as Wrike does not provide a history of the start date and the due date of a task and this is necessary to track a project, here is a workaround for that using custom fields:
We have a server in the background doing automated things. This server goes through all task regularly. For this case it is copying the due date to a custom field named "Original Date Due " if the custom field is not filled yet. So the original due date is saved (ok it does not prevent users from cheating, but that should be some kind of good practice that they do not change this field).
Furthermore we copy the start date to another custom field "start date auto" and the due date to a custom field "due date auto". This is done everytime the custom field is differing from the dates in the task. The advantage of custom fields: they have a history. So you get the history for start and due date.
That's a very great idea!
And it would be even possible to prevent (some) users from cheating, because you could hide the custom fileds in some spaces and make it only visible to department managers, for example.
Thanks so much for sharing this best practice Sven Passinger 🤗
Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Hi Sven, Great workaround, can you briefly explain how this server works or how to install this? thanks a lot!
Hi Rami Khater, the server we use is a Jenkins Server we have and which makes automated processes in our company. We use the Wrike API programming on the Jenkins server and give it access to our tasks (the server has an own Wrike account, so we can follow up what it did). The server goes through our Wrike environment and searches for tasks which have been changed. On tasks changed it performs several points (checks the dates, assignes, what ever you need).
This is a lot of work vs Wrike simply updating the api to also get the "dueDate" of the project. Is this possible for those who do not have the resources to do this with a server?