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Greetings:

I've spent a good deal of time developing Nintex forms and workflows in a test environment (QA) while my IT team was setting up a separate SharePoint farm as a production environment.  Now I'm in the process of moving the work that I've done to the new environment and am finding it very labor intensive due to the many changes I have to make in controls that specifically refer to the QA environment.  Are there best practices for making this task easier, e.g., using form and workflow variables or workflow constants instead of hard coding path names in the controls' configuration?

Thanks,

Bruce

Hi Bruce,

When designing workflows, there are some standard best practices that you can do to reduce or eliminate that type of issue when you migrate from between environments.  You've already hinted at some of these (good use of variables and constants).  But more specifically, look for ways to externalize settings that may be environment specific.  

Besides constants, the easiest way to do this is create a custom list in you SharePoint site (named something like "Workflows Settings"), and put anything that could change between environments in that that list.  Then use the Query List action to lookup those values and assign them to variables, which are then referenced by your actions.

Another approach, would be to store in a SQL table and use Execute SQL action to query the table.


Tom: 

Good suggestions. I've already started doing something like this (with a list) and it will meet some of the need. 

Thanks,

Bruce


Hi Frank.  Yes. I don't think it's the complete answer but it is very helpful nonetheless.  I have marked it as "Correct."


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