Yo yo, greetings everyone!
What if you got a requirement to Start a Task Process for a Group of users in Parallel (all at once),from a matrix containing the structure of your users as well as what they should/can approve.
Sounds pretty simple right? But with Nintex Workflow for Office 365 you get the following Task Actions and each of them have specific functionality:
1. Start a Task Process which is aimed towards Assigning a task to a group of Users, and allows workflow designers to specify task assignment criteria(Assign tasks all at once or in serial) as well as completion criteria (Wait for all responses, Wait for first response, Wait for specific response or Wait for percentage of a response). You may read up more on this action here
2. Assign a Task which is aimed at assigning a task at an individual User. You may read up more on this action here
So to cater for the scenario above (involving a list we could be using as a matrix to help us determine who our approvers are and so forth) I've come up with the following approach:
| # | Step (Workflow Action) | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Query List | Query your list containing your list of approvers and store the result/outcome in a collection variable called collApprovers
Note: Remember that by using the Query List you're able to perform some filters and so forth |
| 2 | Set Workflow Variable | Set a text workflow variable called (ApproverEmailAddresses) to the result returned in step 1. (i.e. the value of collApprovers) |
| 3 | Regular Expression | Take the variable in step 2 (ApproverEmailAddresses) and perform a regular expression to remove the following characters: s ]
"
By performing a replace string operation with an empty text. Store your output in ApproverEmailAddresses.
Note: The pattern you will use to find these characters is e|]|"
|
| 4 | Regular Expression | Perform another Regular expression on ApproverEmailAddresses to replace the , (commas) with ; (semi-colons) and store this again in ApproverEmailAddresses
|
| 5 | Start a task process | Insert a Start Task Process Nintex Workflow Action and insert ApproverEmailAddresses in the Participants field and configure the Assignment Behaviour to Parallel (All at once)
Note: The Start a task process will automatically resolve the participants and assign the task to them accordingly |
And that's it!
Hope this helps someone out there, cheers 
