Can you configure Parent Tasks to show Cancelled if all of the sub tasks have been Cancelled. | Community
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DanaLa3
Level 2
April 14, 2025
Solved

Can you configure Parent Tasks to show Cancelled if all of the sub tasks have been Cancelled.

  • April 14, 2025
  • 3 replies
  • 592 views

When a parent task has children that are cancelled the system shows the status of the Parent task as Complete. I can't find a way to change this. We are trying to build a way to show that a Parent task (which represents a job) was cancelled. We need a way to report on parent tasks that were cancelled and parent tasks that were actually completed because the work is done. Is there a way to set up workfront so that if all children tasks are cancelled the parent task would also show cancelled? 

 

    Best answer by Sven-iX

    Hi @danala3 
    You could delete the child tasks and then you can set the parent to Cancelled. Would that work? 

    3 replies

    skyehansen
    Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
    skyehansenCommunity Advisor and Adobe Champion
    April 14, 2025

    I don't think there's a way to do that. You could try a report to only include parent tasks that have cancelled children, but this would only work if you had no grandchildren (otherwise, you would have to account for all descendants in some way).

      Sven-iX
      Community Advisor
      Sven-iXCommunity AdvisorAccepted solution
      Community Advisor
      April 15, 2025

      Hi @danala3 
      You could delete the child tasks and then you can set the parent to Cancelled. Would that work? 

        D
        DanaLa3Author
        Level 2
        April 15, 2025

        Thanks so much. That would certainly work for any child tasks that were not completed. I would then just have to figure out how to handle some child tasks that were truly worked on verses any others that were no longer needed. I think its going to be a combination of deleting child tasks not worked on and then creatively building reports to excluded canceled child tasks. Thanks everyone for the feedback. 

        Doug_Den_Hoed_AtAppStore
        Community Advisor
        Doug_Den_Hoed_AtAppStoreCommunity Advisor
        Community Advisor
        April 16, 2025

         

        Hi @danala3,

         

        I think I wrangle my new Echo technique to detect and highlight Parent Tasks whose Children (and Grandchildren, and Great Grandchildren, etc.) are all Not Applicable so that you could then (manually) also mark such Parent Tasks as Not Applicable, with confidence.

         

        If that sounds appealing, I'd be happy to take a run at it sometime.

         

        Regards,

        Doug

          kautuk_sahni
          Community Manager
          kautuk_sahniCommunity Manager
          Community Manager
          September 1, 2025

          @danala3 just checking in! Were you able to get this resolved? If one of the replies above helped—whether it completely solved the issue or simply pointed you in the right direction—marking it as accepted can make it much easier for others with the same question to find a solution. And if you found a different way to fix it, sharing your approach would be a great contribution to the community. Your follow-up not only helps close the loop but also ensures others benefit from your experience. Thanks so much for being part of the conversation!

          Kautuk Sahni
          T
          Adobe Employee
          TarangPAAdobe Employee
          Adobe Employee
          November 12, 2025

          @kautuk_sahni The proposed solutions in here are a work around, when logic dictates that one should be able to update the Parent task either independent of the status of Child tasks (not a good idea) or by some rule associated to the aggregate view of state of child tasks.  There is some logic that is triggering the reset to "complete" on the parent task when I look to mark it as "cancelled". What ever that may be isn't a good logic rule thats all and fixing that would be the real solution vs. all users having to discover this anomaly for themselves.

           

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