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  1. Import & sync
  2. Import from Asana

Import from Asana

This page helps you bring an Asana project into By Dawn. At the end its tasks are By Dawn tickets, its subtasks are sub-tickets, and, if you chose to keep syncing, the two stay in step until your end date. Import and sync explains the steps every tracker shares, so this page covers only what’s particular to Asana.

Before you start

Section titled “Before you start”
  • You need to be a project admin in By Dawn, and an org admin has to approve By Dawn’s app (see Before you start).
  • The grant acts as the person who approves it. By Dawn works in Asana as that member: it sees the projects they can see, and its changes and comments show under their name. So approve it as someone who’s a member of the project, or as a dedicated Asana account if you don’t want By Dawn’s changes under your own name.

Connect

Section titled “Connect”

  1. Sign in to Asana as the member By Dawn should act as.

  2. In By Dawn, open Settings › Import & sync › New import, pick Asana and choose Connect.

  3. Asana shows what By Dawn asks for. Choose Allow.

  4. Asana sends you back to By Dawn, and the page shows the connected Asana workspace.

Pick what to bring

Section titled “Pick what to bring”

Pick one project. Its tasks, their subtasks, comments and attachments come over.

How Asana maps

Section titled “How Asana maps”

Asana has no status categories, so its sections are matched to columns by name, and you check each one.

  • Sections. By Dawn suggests a column from words in the section’s name: Done, Complete or Shipped suggest a completed column, Review or QA a review column, Doing or In progress a building column, Backlog or Ideas the backlog, and anything else a to-do column.
  • Completed tasks. A task you ticked as complete in Asana lands in a completed column, whatever section it sits in. So the project needs a completed column before you can import.
  • Priorities. Asana has no priority field, so tickets come in with no priority.
  • Subtasks become sub-tickets. A subtask of a subtask is flattened to a sub-ticket, with a related link back to its old parent.
  • Dependencies become blocking relations.
  • Tags become labels.
  • Descriptions are converted from Asana’s rich text to markdown.

When you sync both ways

Section titled “When you sync both ways”

By Dawn writes back the title, description, section, assignee and tags, plus new comments. Moving a ticket into a completed column marks the task complete in Asana, and moving it out marks it incomplete. A tag that doesn’t exist in Asana yet is created. New tickets you create in By Dawn are added to the project.

By Dawn sets up an Asana webhook on the project when a sync starts, so an edit in Asana usually reaches By Dawn within a minute. If Asana drops the webhook, By Dawn sets it up again, and its regular check every few minutes catches anything missed in between.

Where to go next

Section titled “Where to go next”