Copy blank custom fields and dropdowns to new boards
Asked by John:

HI, I have a Board with a list that has multiple Detail Cards, these detail cards hold information About each Trade we use ( trade name, email, ph number, days notice etc). I want to have a custom Field dropdown created in a all cards in a list on another board , this dropdown list needs to contain all the "Trade names"

Alternatively I have a template board with a list called "schedule" this list contain cards with 2 custom field dropdowns "Trade" and "defect type" , each of these have 10 potential values. I want to have these appear on other boards.... with all of the dropdown values .

Also if i want to make changes to the details list or template lists , i want to apply the values across all boards.

I think Buttler might be able to do this but not sure where to start


Answers:
author: milynnus
body: [@John](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/4430987)

Key points to note. Custom field definitions is at the board level and it applies to all the cards on the board. If you want to update dropdown CF you will have to deploy some code to achieve it.   
I discovered you can get Trello to create the cf definitions on a board with custom field power up activated when you copy a card with the CF values set from another board.


author: Iain Dooley
body: [@John](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/4430987) for the dynamic dropdown list, I think you'll have trouble getting this done as a dropdown. When I implemented a similar thing I had it so you create a card with a name and then you get a checklist of linked cards from the directory board that have a partial name match. You can then check off an item to select that supplier, who is then linked as a trello card attachment, and the full name (and id) is set as the trigger card name.

It's a little slower than selecting from a dropdown, but dropdowns are kind of a non-scalable solution, they can become cumbersome to select for large numbers of options, and to my knowledge there is no way to re-order dropdown options even with the API, there is no update dropdown option endpoint, only add, fetch and delete:

![2021-06-10 at 7.28 pm.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/146931i0EAB6F6823460018/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "2021-06-10 at 7.28 pm.png")

If you were to delete all the options and re-add the same options in alphabetical order, all the cards which already had values selected would lose that information, so you'd have to build an array of card/option values, then rebuild the options, then select the appropriate option. It would be super messy.

You can create the same custom fields easily enough on a bunch of different boards from a template, but again synching them is problematic because of the ordering problem. IMHO you're better off using checklists for this sort of multiple choice. You can reorder them and it's easier to keep them in synch across multiple boards.

The options for "looping through" lists of things like boards, cards and checklist items in Butler is limited, so you'd probably need a more serious piece of API code. We have an automation platform capable of building these sorts of API automations using my open source Trellinator framework which is butler-like but uses JavaScript instead of a no code builder:

<http://www.benkobot.com/>

comments: author: milynnus
body: [@John](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/4430987)

If you are into using python. The py-Trello libraries had recently being updated to use the api in [@Iain Dooley](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/1416112) post.