Automated Task Generation from Blueprints with Baserow & Weekend-Aware Scheduling

This n8n template demonstrates how to automatically create tasks (or in general, records) in Baserow based on template or blueprint tables. The first blueprint table is the master table that holds the general information about the template. For example: a standard procedure to handle incidents. The second table is the details table that holds multiple records for the template. Each record in that table is a specific task that needs to be assigned to someone with a certain deadline.

This makes it easy to streamline task creation for recurring processes. Use cases are many:

• Project management (generate tasks for employees based on a project template)
• HR & onboarding (generate tasks for employee onboarding based on a template)
• Operations (create checklists for maintenance, audits, or recurring procedures)

Good to know

• The Baserow template for handling Standard Operating Procedures works perfect as a base schema to try out this workflow.
• Authentication is done through a database token. Check the documentation on how to create such a token.
• Tasks are inserted using the HTTP request node instead of a dedicated Baserow node. This is to support batch import instead of importing records one by one.

Requirements

• Baserow account (cloud or self-hosted)
• A Baserow database with at least the following tables:
  • Assignee / employee table. This is required to be able to assign someone to a task.
  • Master table with procedure or template information. This is required to be able to select a certain template
  • Details table with all the steps associated with a procedure or template. This is required to convert each step into a specific task.
    • A step must have a field Days to complete with the number of days to complete the step. This field will be used to calculate the deadline.
  • Tasks table that contains the actual tasks with an assignee and deadline.

How it works

• Trigger task creation (webhook)
  • The automation starts when the webhook is triggered through a POST request.
  • It should contain an assignee, template, date and note in the body of the request.
  • It will send a succes or failure response once all steps are completed.
• Configure settings and ids
  • Stores the ids of the involved Baserow database and tables, together with the API credentials and the data from the webhook.
• Get all template steps
  • Gets all the steps from the template Details table that are associated with the id of the Master template table.
  • For example: the master template can have a record about handling customer complaints. The details table contains all the steps to handle this procedure.
• Calculate deadlines for each step
  • Prepares the input of the tasks by using the same property names as the field of the Tasks table. Adjust this names, add or remove fields if this is required for your database structure.
  • The deadline of each step is calculated by adding the number of days a step can take based on the deadline of the first step. This is done through a field Days to complete in the template Details table.
    • For example. If the schedule_date property in the webhook is set to 2025-10-01 and the Days to complete for the step is 3, then the deadline will be 2025-10-04
• Avoid scheduling during the weekend
  • It might happen that the calculated deadline is on a Saturday or Sunday. This Code node moves those dates to the first Monday to avoid scheduling during the weekend.
• Aggregate tasks for insert
  • Aggregates the data from the previous nodes as an array in a property named items. This matches perfect with the Baserow API to insert new records in batch.
• Generate tasks in batch
  • Calls the API endpoint /api/database/rows/table/{table_id}/batch/ to insert multiple records at once in the tasks table. Check the Baserow API documentation for further details.
• Success / Error response
  • Sends a simple text response to indicate the success or failure of the record creation. This is to offer feedback when triggering the automation from a Baserow application, but can be replaced with a JSON response.

How to use

• Call the Trigger task creation node with the required parameters through a POST request. This can be done from any web application. For example: the application builder in Baserow supports an action to send an HTTP request. The Procedure details page in the Standard Operating Procedures template demonstrates this action.

  • The following information is required in the body of the request. This information is required to create the actual tasks.

    {
        "assignee_id": integer refering to the id of the assignee in the database,
        "template_id": integer refering to the id of the template or procedure in the master table,
        "schedule_date": the date the tasks need to start scheduling,
        "note": text with an optional note about the tasks
    }
    

• Set the corresponding ids in the Configure settings and ids node.

• Check the names of the properties in the Calculate deadlines for each step node. Make sure the names of those properties match the field names of your Tasks table.

• You can replace the text message in the Success response and Failure response with a more structured format if this is necessary in your application.

Customising this workflow

• Add support for public holidays (e.g., using an external calendar API).
• Modify the task assignment logic (e.g., pre-assign tasks in the details table).
• Combine with notifications (email, Slack, etc.) to alert employees when new tasks are generated.