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As you know, you can set alerts right through Sharepoint so you will receive an email when items are added or modified.

I currently have a handful of teammates receiving these alerts.  One of my issues is, when my workflow updates an item, it pops off another notification, so my team is getting duplicate alerts.  One from the actual change that was made to the item, and another one when the workflow updates the item immediately AFTER the change.

I would like to use a notification action to achieve this instead, to avoid the duplicates and give me a little more granular control over what appears in the actual notification itself.

However, the Sharepoint list notifications actually show the recipient what was edited, with a highlighted "Edited" on the right, a strikethrough and the new value of the field, which is pretty valuable.  

Not sure how to replicate this functionality (showing what was edited) with a notification action.  Any ideas?

The challenge with duplicating the native SharePoint functionality of showing the edited content is that there isn't a way (that I'm aware of) to get what the previous value was of the field that was changed.  The only way I've accomplished this in the past is by having to create a 2nd column for all the fields that I wanted to capture the previous value to show what changed.  When an item is created, I set those field to the same value as the main fields they correspond to.  Then when you run your notification workflow, if one of those fields changed, you'll have both the previous value and the current value.  Then after you send the notification, you update the previous value columns to the current value again.  I posted a more detailed example here  .  


Hi Chris,

As Brendan suggested that it might be difficult to get the old data when it was updated by the Nintex workflow without resorting to copying it to a different column, would you also consider if you changed your Sharepoint Alerts from (receive notification immediately) to daily, then you would only have one notification per day without multiple alerts suggesting every change?

sure this doesn't solve the problem, but could be used as an alternate quicker approach?

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Regards,

Shrini


This is bad news, but from all the reading I've done, looks like you're right.  Thanks Brendan!


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