How to compare/ Match lists of item from two sources?

Questions & Answers
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Situation

I pulling items (projects and their statuses) from two different systems. We are using Asana for project management, then we have to reconcile their status in our legal/ IP project system.

Manual Solution

We often spend lots of time copying and pasting all the projects from both sources into a spreadsheet, then matching the projects with their pair. We then have to see if each project’s status is in sync ( status e.g. exploratory, documents submitted, under contract, closed, filed for IP, etc). This takes a lot of time.

Make solution?

I would love to make Make.com work, but it doesn’t seem to give me enough power. I would need to

  1. list the projects in Asana,
  2. pull data from our legal API (over the HTTP module),
  3. convert both sources into comparable-friendly forms,
  4. loop through both lists simultaneously of data to find their match
  5. take each match and put it into another list
  6. read each match and decide if both statuses match
  7. out the match and their results to a CSV or spreadsheet like Google.

Make doesn’t seem to be a good option for 4-6. Is there something that I’m missing?

Thanks

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Hey @Isla_smeiling ,

I could Image two ways of doing it. The first one, using Google Sheets / Microsoft 365:

  1. Adding all Asana Projects in the List
  2. then Looping though all the projects from the other source, and adding them and their data to the rows of the asana Excel if they Match, also having one Column called like “Match?” and setting that to true if it matches
  3. Going through all the Rows and deleteing those that have “Match?” = false or empty
  4. After that, you would have a list in Google Sheets only containing the matching items.
  5. Then you could loop through all the rows again, and compare the Asana Status to the other Status, and have another column called “StatusMatch” and set that one to true or false.
  6. Afterwards you export all the Items that have or do not have a status match. (actually, you already have it in google sheets then)

The other solution would be using make.com Datastores, just roughly:
Every night, pull all Asana Project Data into one data store and all the other project data into another data store, and then Loop through all the records of one data store, get the matching Project in the other data store, and check if their status matches.

If you need more info on one of the solutions, let me know!

Christoph Gerl
Funkenwerfer Process & CRM-Automation

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Wow that is great to have not one, but two solutions! I come from a developer background, so sometimes i feel like I know what I want to do, but not how to do it within the Make context. when you say loop though, are you talking about the Modules like (Aggregator or Convertor) or other Make.com function to do this?

any example on how to complete this with Make.com, like documentation examples would be oustandings

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Hey @Isla_smeiling ,

I’m also coming from a developer background and that’s what makes make.com so much fun, you can apply a lot of your knowledge to implement cool things.

I recorded a loom for you, in which I’m trying to explain the logic behind bundles, iterators and more:
https://www.loom.com/share/feaab84f1e674810875e4bb6c9d00cd4

Additional Documentation Resources:
https://www.make.com/en/help/modules/iterator
https://www.make.com/en/help/modules/aggregator

Christoph Gerl
Funkenwerfer Process & CRM-Automation

2 Likes
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This was exactly what I needed! Thank you! I might have a few questions, but you helped tremendously.

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