Advanced Checklist Automation?
Asked by John Cole:

We use Trello daily for our Focus Room and Top Actions. We also use it for new hires, and we manage their first 90 days with checklists of actions to get accomplished. I'm looking for a way to create a list (Excel seems like the easiest) of actions, dates and members then dump those into a checklist and have it create the individual items in the list.

I can do this for checklists without dates and assigned members, but I need to do this with the dates. The issue is we have 30-40 actions. They start on day 1 of the new hire onboarding, and I would prefer not to have to go item by item to add dates and owners. Is this possible? I can't find anything to help.


Answers:
author: milynnus
body: [@John Cole](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/4860224)

I have worked with advanced checklist in several projects. The most recently is MirrorSync that supports advanced checklist.

I cannot recall a power up or services that does it. It is definitely achievable with code. Creating it on a existing card would be more challenging vs create a new card with the checklist.

One of the requirements is to ensure there is a proper translation of the assigned member to the idMember and a properly structured date.

I will insert here a service I built to created new cards with existing custom fields. The same concept can be applied to creating a checklist.

<https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Trello-discussions/Trello-Form-for-Custom-Fields-and-More-prototype/td-p/1984062>

I have another project that turned numbered list into a checklist via an email. I would imagine that it can be enhanced to inspect each item for @username %date before creating the checklist on the card.

comments: author: John Cole
body: While I'm not as robust a user in Trello, I have some experience with different applications and automation? Where would I start to learn to use code to accomplish this on my own?

So far, I'm trying Zapier. I can use Excel to add items to the checklist, but I can't find a way to assign due dates to those actions.


author: milynnus
body: [@John Cole](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/4860224)

In Zapier you would probably be looping through an array to create the checklist. You will need to insert some code after the built, if possible, to update the items with idMember and the due date. I just checked Trello API for checklist, I am not 100% that has has the ability to update the idMember and due on an item. I am using a python wrapper but in Zapier you cannot import that library. So you need to pass the data to an endpoint to handle it for you.


author: milynnus
body: [@John Cole](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/4860224)

Testing out this concept

![Screen Shot 2022-04-06 at 8.29.03 AM.jpg](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/191680i7B84EACF81F05F0D/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "Screen Shot 2022-04-06 at 8.29.03 AM.jpg")


author: John Cole
body: That would be awesome. How would I implement something like that?


author: milynnus
body: [@John Cole](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/4860224)

Completed converting my email2board to handle the above.

A bit more work will need to be done to parse out the username and dates since I assumed that there is only 1 space between item name, username and date.

**Update : more intelligent parsing implemented, with a register for board and user credentials**

If you are interested in test it drop me a note. My profile page has my contact.


author: milynnus
body: [@John Cole](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/4860224)

Just created this documentation for this project **"Email to Advanced Checklist"**

<https://github.com/xu2xulim/Trello-Email/blob/master/Solutions/Email%20to%20Advanced%20Checklist.md>


author: milynnus
body: [@John Cole](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/4860224)

Zapier has a **transfer** feature that allows you to load data from Sheet or Excel and otheres. It can call a post request to create the Advanced Checklist with assignment and due dates. It requires a premium plan on Zapier/

An endpoint would look something like

<https://hfetwp.deta.dev/redoc>


Tags: checklist