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Parent-child relations between cards and checklist items
Parent-child relations between cards and checklist items
Gustavo Simões Braga avatar
Written by Gustavo Simões Braga
Updated over a week ago

With Placker's parent-child cards, you can establish a hierarchical relation between cards. While summary tasks can have subtasks as checklist items, they will be visible as separate cards at the same time. The representation below shows "Child A.1", which is at the same time a card and an item in card "Parent A".

For example, a portfolio manager might need an overview of all the projects planned, which may contain thousands of tasks. It would be unfeasible to create a card for each of them in this case. So she adds a card for each project, and adds tasks as checklist items.

The project manager might want to add details to a task (such as descriptions, attachments, comments). This not possible with items, so the option is to create a project board and add cards in it.

But if they want to have both, they can use Placker to mirror items into cards. Tasks will be items at the Portfolio board and cards at the Project board at the same time.

Plus, they will be synced, to if the Project manager marks a card as complete, the Portfolio board will also be updated reducing the need of sending a message to say that it's done.

Placker track views and reports are card level, so this also helps in those cases.

By using the parent-child feature, these are some of the awesome things that you will be able to do:

  • Easily create create and link parent and child cards

  • Navigate between cards in both levels

  • Analyze cards according to the parent structure in the track view

  • Identify groups of cards that are connected to each other in the board view where layout is by parent

That is, you can use to deal with tasks in two levels: summary tasks and subtasks.

Navigate to parents and children with one click from the card overview:

When set, the parent card title is visible on the front of the card to understand the context. The parent card link is available on the top of the card. Checklist items that are linked as children have an 'Open card' button to navigate to the child card.

Analyze cards according to the parent structure in the track view

The parent card title can be used in the track view, for example to show the number of cards per parent. Or use a parent card picker to zoom in to a specific parent.

Show cards by parent in the flexible layout

Use the flexible layout to split or list your boards by parent card. This works for single board and board group views.

How to create create and link parent and child cards

There are many different ways to create this kind of relations in cards. Check the following options to choose which works best for you.

Card overview buttons

We added buttons to create parent and child cards from the back of the cards or by dragging and dropping cards into checklists.

This applies to single checklist items or you can also click the three-dots icon next to the whole checklist:

Click and Drag cards or items​

You can make an existing card become a child of another card, either in the card overview or by dragging the item into a card:

Or you can set the layout of the board view to be grouped by parent card, then drag child cards into them:

Rule based mirroring

If you need to mirror many items, it might be a good idea to create a rule to do this in an automated way.

You can create a rule where whenever a member is added to a checklist item, it creates a child card in another board, for example.

This article will provide more information on automated parent child card mirroring:

Creating parent/child cards by pasting URL

You can also create child cards by simply adding its URL in a checklist in Trello. This means that you can quickly add all the tasks that need to be done for a specific project and link to the relevant cards for each task, while updates will be synced in this case (e.g. member, due date or completion updates).

This can be a quicker way to create an item to card mirror. There are Butler rules that create linked cards, which will also be synced.

For the mirror link to be created automatically, you need to enable this at the Placker board settings, in the Mirror settings tab, enabling the Automatic detect option and saving it.

Whenever child cards and their checklist item have the same title, you will see the title clickable in the Trello checklist. If the title of the card is different, you will see both the clickable title of the card and the title of the checklist item next to it. This is demonstrated in the example below:

This makes it easier to visualize which is the parent card and which are the child cards and keep track of all your tasks, no matter how many you have. Also, Placker now detects the card title when the item is only an URL.

Give it a try and let us know if you think this can be useful for your team. We will be happy to clarify any questions.

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