Nintex Site Workflow not running

Any suggestions?

site workflow is not related to a list at all, aka no list limitation/size might apply on site workflow.

it can either be started by a schedule or manually.

so what you exactly mean with site workflow is/is not fired on list?

and what problem do you experience?

as far as I know site workflows can only be triggered manually or by a scheduel when they are not linked to lists. So size of lists should not have a influence.

If you wang to debug a site workflow you can start them manually in the "View all site content" page, then check the status of the workflow

Hope that help~

Hi Eden / Marian - Thank you for responding. I have the site workflow scheduled to fire at 1am every day but it doesn't fire for all items. It is suppose to set a field to the current date, however it doesn't do this for all of the items in the list (50k+ items). That got me wondering if there was an issue with Nintex workflow functionality and the size of SharePoint lists.

can you post some details how do you identify which items to update and how have you setup whole workflow?

site workflow do not fire for every single list item. it starts juts one instance and within the workflow you have to identify which items are of interest.

do you get any error when there is not updated whole set of expected items?

Sure - It is very simple. It is schedule to run at 1am each morning and the only action I have is to update multiple items from the list and the one field to update to be updated with the workflow context Current Date option.

It sounds like you are performing a query on the list and then updating a column in the list for all items returned in the query using a loop, correct?

You'll need to confirm this and also clarify what you mean by not firing. It could be because the query turns too many results for the workflow to deal with in one blow. You could consider indexing some of the columns to help this but we need more detail before helping further.

I only have one action which is to update multiple items in one list with today's date. I am not using any specific query action item, but I guess this counts as a query when updating multiple items, so yes.

When I say not firing I mean they don't update. I have items that show 11/7 as the current date and other items that have no value in the current date field.

The list only has 30 columns, but like I said there are more than 50k + items within it, which I think is causing overload on the workflow.

Normally I don't use "update multiple items" action so often, Instead I often query the whole list for all items ID then store them in a single collection workflow varaible, then use a "For each" action to do what I want in the loop. And the basic structure may looks like this:

I got this idea from another post in this forum, but I forget its name now... BTW, Personally I think doing sth to a single item in a single action then loop it for times is a more stable method. I did suffer errors caused by delays in "update items" action, and that's why I don't like put anything in one action as well.

Hope that help~

it's very likely that attempt to update 50k+ items in one go will fail.

either due to sharepoint resource limits or due to timeout.

you will have to break up the whole dataset into smaller chunks and make updates chunk by chunk.

one possible approach could be as Eden suggested to update it item by item. but as he depicts it it will still fail for so huge dataset. you will have to assure that there is called commit pending changes action within the loop regularly after reasonable amount of items is processed.

the other approach is that you split the dataset into chunks by some flag field directly in the list and make updates (update multiple items) just for items having the same flag in one go. you read more on that approach here Big Data and Nintex: Batch Processing Large Datasets in Parallel Using a Nintex Site Workflow - SharePoint Blog 

I've heard that updating no more than 100 items at a time is safe.

that sounds reasonable.

UpdateListItems method of Lists.asmx webservice has eg. documented limit of 160 items updated per single batch.

however, I haven't seen documented any limit for nintex' update multiple items action, neither I know how it is internally implemented and so whether this limit applies to it or not.

Thanks Frank - We decided to go a coded route to get around this.