[Status: Not planned] Feature Request: Automatically add task references to comment stream of referenced tasks

Hey Joel, that's really interesting! So, apart from essentially @mentioning a task, you would like that to be noted in the @mentioned task's description too, right? 

@Anastasia, I'm not sure I quite understand what you're asking. So, let me try to rephrase what I was trying to say.

I frequently have tasks that are related to each other. They don't really depend on each other (dependency) and aren't really sub-tasks of each other. Since they're related, I want to somehow link them together so when I go to one of them, there is some way for me to know that the other one exists and is related to that task. Without this ability to relate tasks, my only way to handle that is by going into each task and either pasting into the description the permalink of the other task or adding a comment with the permalink of the other task. I currently do that in both tasks (each referencing the other task's permalink) so that no matter which task I go to I can see that there is a related task.

In my original request I asked that if I reference a task via permalink (in either description or comment), I would like the task that I referenced to automatically know that it was referenced and display that somewhere.

While I was writing this follow-up to your comment, I think another feature request has become more clear. That's some functionality to mark a task as related. Maybe similar to the sub-tasks where you can start typing and a search box will appear. I'll probably create another post with that request.

I still think that the original request here is still needed. There are many times where it's helpful to mention another task even when it's not closely related. In those cases, it would help to have the task that's mentioned to know that it was mentioned and display that.

Joel, that really helps, thanks for sharing so many details here! I think that the original title you have here actually encompasses both of the requests you've outlined, and I think it would be helpful to keep them in one place so they would be easier to find. Thanks again for taking the time to write all of this up!

I found this request while searching before creating one of my own, so I'd like to add on to Joel's request, with a slightly different nuance.

I often find myself referencing a task (or folder) while in another task. It's painful to have to leave that comment, mid-way through, to go FIND the permalink for the other task I want to mention. So, like you phrased it Anastasia, I'd like to '@mention' another task or folder where the in-Comment (or in-Description) SEARCH is powerful - like the global search box is - and the other task is found by typing a few key words after a symbol.

So I might be leaving a comment about Program A's needs and say:

'We tackled an analogous problem with this improvement for Program B +[TYPE KEY WORDS for DYNAMIC SEARCH]. Would that work for you?"

Search results would appear as I type, I can pick the one I'm thinking about, and then Wrike inserts the Title of the Task and an underlying link to the task (much like @mentions for other users).

Thanks for considering this time-saver :)

I'm a big fan of this idea Jamie so thanks for sharing the slight difference here and bumping this post, this input will be brought to the attention of the Product Team and if and when they add it to their Product roadmap I'll be sure to update you. Thanks again 🙌

TargetProcess has a nice way of adding and displaying task relations: https://www.targetprocess.com/guide/working-with-entities/relations/relations-management/.  The Inbound vs Outbound relation probably isn't necessary since we already have ability to specify dependencies between tasks.  However, It would be great to be able to define the relation type to suit each organizations needs.  This would allow us, for example,to associate a bug tasks with test case tasks or user story tasks.  This would allow users to clearly see how many bugs are related to a particular user story or test case.

Hi, 

From my experience, it is essential to add this feature. I hope to see it in next nearest update. Thanks. 

Well, I forgot that I already asked for this back in March so here I am again!

Please: While I'm editing a Task, is there a faster way (of any kind) to find and link to the 'other' task that's related than now: closing the one I'm in, finding the other one, opening the permalink button and copying, then returning to my first task to paste it in?

Every time I enjoy this ability in another system like GitLab, TargetProcess and Jira (yeah, I use too many systems), it reminds me that it's missing here!

I agree, we could use that feature a lot.

In our case, we do tasks for users requests that moves up one workflow, and related tasks for the actual software build that follows another workflow.

Up voting!! This would be quite helpful!

Also upvote.  Essential feature of jira and other top issue trackers.  You guys could easily just expand the dependency task field with a few extra relations like "relates to," meaning nothing other than they relate and that's all, "caused by" is another good one, and for another example, "discovered while testing."  One final one that comes to mind is "duplicates," which could lead to cancelling one task that is replaced by another, but not deleting the task if you wanted to keep record that the initial one existed and how it wound up getting replaced, etc.

Hi again, this is a really essential feature I think, wanted to reference this article:

https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115002961109--Linking-to-projects-tasks

where something similar is discussed.  I would in fact suggest that you allow users to quick add tasks either with a "/" in the task description, or the @command.  You guys already have a great feature to allow referencing existing tasks in subtasks by just typing them in, I've never seen that in another PM app.  What you are missing though sadly is this simple reciprocal linking, discussed in this thread, and the one I linked to above.  I agree with the references to GitHub, TargetProcess as good examples.  And the suggestion that you list the related tasks simply at the top of the task like subtasks is very good, too.

And would really like to put in a huge request that this not be limited just to tasks, but include folders and projects.  You can already unfurl those in task descriptions, and this is a bonus as most apps I've seen like Jira don't allow any mentioning of projects themselves across the app like that, just tasks, and you lose context this way as frequently there is a need to reference back to a whole project.

Please guys give this one some consideration!  With the ability to already find existing tasks when typing in subtasks, which a few posters have cited, you are almost there!

Hi everyone, thanks for your use-cases and votes here! For now, the feature is not planned by our Product team. If that ever changes, I'll get back to you here to let you know.

Thanks for commenting!

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

This would absolutely be helpful in managing projects so we can ensure that things are not missed in our ever growing backlog 

I'd also like to jump back in here and add that in general, with the visibility of unfurled tasks in other tasks' descriptions and comments, I think the addition of the Task/Job ID would be a huge win.  Right now without that, with a growing Wrike instance, it can be hard to figure out which task is which over time.  I could easily see a software team having tons of tasks about "API" this or the other.  Without the Task ID, which is how Jira, Clubhouse, and other software tools implement this, it is hard to get full context.

Thanks for listening!

My team would find this very helpful.  I'm very disappointed that it's not already available.

I would love this feature, currently i manually copy the permalink between tasks and a copy of the comment on multiple tabs which is a pain.

The ideal feature is like the feature in Jira where you can link tasks using different relationships (e.g. relates to, duplicates, causes, blocks, etc), it gives a better graphical view of how tasks relate to each other.

I great example is when people add multiple topics to a single email (for external people i communicate with where Wrike is not an option), or a meeting where multiple projects/tasks are discussed and all need to be linked into the task they relate to. You want a record of the meeting as a whole and you want the details also referenced within the tasks themselves.

Hi again, everyone! Just wanted to pop back in here to say that the suggestion remains not planned for now. I'll let you know if that changes, and thank you again for the feedback provided here! 

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

Lisa, hey, this is one of my biggest disappointments with Wrike as you guys are so close with some of the functionality that exists like the ability to auto-complete from across Wrike in the subtask field, and the unfurling of tasks once their link is pasted in to a description or comment in another task or Project/Folder.  

It would really go a long way if you could shed some light - some specifics - on what you guys would need to see to move this along.  The fact that it's actually in "not planned" status I find as something encouraging actually as that implies you are considering it.  

If you simply don't like this idea, I'd really like to know as I think myself, along with a host of other users, would benefit from knowing where you guys really stand on a range of request in here that are years old.  I appreciate you can't publish a roadmap or commit to certain timelines.  But we are talking years here for some things that are pretty simple features.

So please, shed all the light your product team will allow on this very key feature.  I truly hope you guys can move forward on it.

Thank you.

Lisa I wanted to ask about this one again as it's really one of my big pain points with Wrike.  Is there any way you could shed some light about whether this is something Product thinks is sensible, or is there a fundamental sentiment in Product that this is not a good idea?  As so many have posted, also in this thread:

https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115002961109--Linking-to-projects-tasks

Wrike almost has this capability and it seems like it would not take a lot to implement it:

- you already have some functionality that allows for "searching through" all tasks when you create a subtask.  So you just need to surface this in Task Descriptions or Comment streams with a @mention or / command perhaps.

- Wrike bot can then get into the comment stream of the mentioned task and add a notation that the mention occurred back in the originating task (or project/folder even)

You have over 100 votes for these two requests, which are basically the same thing, so I really hope your Product Team is treating them the same.

I also want to point out that you could have a Custom Field type that could handle this.  This would be terrific for development use cases - and I think you guys have a lot of potential to build Wrike as more of a software development-friendly tool - so you could set up relations like "discovered during" or "Cannot reproduce" by naming a Field with those terms, but having the data type of the field be "task" as opposed to the current types like date, etc.

This is what Jira does:

It would really be very easy for you guys to accomplish this with Custom Fields, and bring a whole range of new, exciting potential to Wrike.

I'm happy to start a new request around "Task Linking with Custom Fields" if you think that would make sense.  But it's all part of the general hope that tasks can automatically pick up relations to other tasks as a fundamental feature here in Wrike!

Hey everyone, thank you for all of your feedback here.

We would love to be able to implement every suggestion that we get on the Community, but there are many reasons why this isn't the case.

In regards to this particular idea, the Product team are currently focused on improving other aspects of the product. If there are any changes or updates to this, however, I'll be sure to let you all know here.

If you have any other questions or feedback, let me know 😊

Hi guys, there hasn't been much movement on this from the Wrike team and we are at 82 votes and counting.  This is a big trend in Work Mgmt Tools right now, and it is a very useful feature once you get a chance to use it.  Is there any thought to add this into the mix at all?  It could be done via Wrike Bot into the comment stream as OP Joel Rowley suggests, and you'd really keep pace with some of the cutting edge tools like Roam, ClickUp, Fibery, and Notion, all of which introduced this feature essentially in the last year.  Others like Monday, Coda, Asana (great chance to have something they don't) are lagging and don't do this.

You already have very nice unfurling within comments and task descriptions of OTHER projects/folders/tasks in Wrike, but you can't see in the "linked" entity that it was linked elsewhere.  So as I've said, and the other posters here, you really can't get the benefit of true context without this reciprocal linking.

Also, please consider merging and adding the additional three votes from this request, as it's exactly the same thing:

https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360037418634-Backwards-Links?page=1#community_comment_1500000272722

Thanks!

Hi Al Sape and everyone, apologies for the late reply here! I spoke to the team and they confirmed that they do have plans for introducing improvements to linking tasks/ task referencing. I don't have any more detail right now, but this should at least be moving in the direction pointed in this thread. Thank you so much for your continued support, I should be able to share more detail by the end of Q2. 

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, my upvote for this much needed feature.

Lisa Could you please share an update.

Thank you for supporting the suggestion Ivan Matosyan! 

I'm checking with the team now to see if there's an update here, I'll get back to you as soon as I can 👍

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 again, everyone! Just a quick note that there are no updates here currently.

I'll let you know if there's one in the future. 

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

This is my #1 wrike pain point and the reason we continue to debate migrating to a different tool. Ridiculous that you can't easily cross-link two related items. We end up over-nesting things, for example the same task lives under Project A and Folder B, since the information it contains is useful to both. Agree with all the OVER 4 YEARS WORTH of sentiments expressed here and in similar posts.  

Thank you for your feedback Ellen Nunes, and I'm sorry to hear you're disappointed here. I'm passing your feedback to the Product team.

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

Would love to see this feature added to Wrike. Any updates on if/when it may get implemented Lisa?

Welcome back to the Community George Daniel 👋 I don't have an update for cross-referencing tasks at the moment, but our team has just released a smart feature for AI subtask creation to Wrike Labs, please check it out if you're interested. 

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