Report Question: Can you show all the people assigned to a task throughout its cycle if the owner changed multiple times?

[RyanMcGee]

I am trying to use the Journal report feature to answer the following question:

"I want to see the history of task ownership. So if Mary originally owned it, then gave it to Kevin, who then passed it to Sally, then I'd want to see all three historical owners of the report."

Might be asking too much, but this group is really report savvy so hopefully you have insight!

Cheers,

Ryan

[William--]

Hi Ryan, 

First thing to check is confirmation that your system is tracking assignment changes. The below toggle needs to be enabled. 

With that enabled, going forward you will see a history of assignment changes in each task or issue's update stream.

You can also create a Journal Entry report, as you started to do. The text mode filter needed is: 

fieldName=status
fieldName_Mod=cine
subObjCode=ASSGN
subObjCode_Mod=eq

This will display all events in which an Assignment record was added, edited, or deleted (excluding simple status changes). 

Then in your report view, you can add columns like "Project: Name" "Task: Name" "Edited By: Name" "Assigned To: Name" and more. 

The most efficient way to use this type of report would be to add it to a dashboard; then add that dashboard as a Custom Section to your Tasks and/or Issues layout. Doing this will automatically filter the report results to only the task or issue being viewed. (You can also add the dashboard to your Projects layout to see all Assignment changes for the project).

If not embedding this report into your layout, you will likely need to add in additional filter logic to make sense of all the entries returned. Good luck!

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Excellent answer @William--, 

Particularly, as I navigate here to say so, with the images you included (but did not come through to me in my email alert, despite my preferences to send as html... @jon_chen, know any tricks to accomplish the latter?)

Regards,

Doug 

[jon_chen]

Hey @Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore 

Interesting that the images were not included in your email alert. To confirm, did you uncheck the "Remove HTML from posts" option per Step 5 in this guide?

If so, please let me know and I'll see where I can investigate further.

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Ah! Thanks @jon_chen:,

Those "strip from email" options were indeed still "on", so have just set them "off".

If that doesn't fix it, I'll let you know.

Cheers,

Doug

[Rafal_Bain]

Hi @William-- ,

by any chance do you know trick to include in the report only "latest" assignment? 

I have report exactly like the one you described for another reason, but on occassion task is being reassigned couple times before it finds owner and I only need that last assignment bit.

Would that be doable?

[William-- · Accepted solution]

Not so sure about that, mostly because a Task/Issue >> Assignments is a One >> Many relationship, since a task/issue can be assigned to more than one user/role/team. So if one task is assigned to two users, that generates two assignments. Either one of those users could be the "last" assignment made and would probably appear to be arbitrary. 

If you are using this report in a Dashboard Custom Section (report rows automatically filtering to the work object being viewed):
I think you could leverage an Assignment report with no filter (as opposed to a Journal Entry report with an Assignment filter). The Assignment report won't show assignments that have been removed, it will only show current assignments, who made them, when, and who's assigned, etc. If the task is only assigned to one user, then the assignment report will always show just the latest assignment made. If the task is assigned to multiple resources, the report will show the assignment details for each assigned resource. I think the part that speaks to your challenge is that it will be a clean list because won't show assignments that have been removed.

If you are using this as a standalone report:
I still think you're looking at an Assignment report because it can't show assignments that were removed, it can only show assignments that exist right now. The primary benefit of a Journal Entry report is showing historical details, and it seems like you don't need that for this challenge. 

[Rafal_Bain]

thank you, I actually forgot about the assignment report while working on this one, but indeed it wil give the right results. There is just one exception with mulitple users assigned to same task. Than I will have duplicates, but in my specific use case this is less likely.

Thanks!