Question from a current customer:
I am looking to create wizard-style workflow.
It supposed to have a form with tabs: "Request Permission", "Select Files", "Confirm Selection", "Upload", Edit Metadata".
Each tab is responsible for certain step in the workflow (an action would be performed and workflow state changed). Workflow state may be changed conditionally.
I am having trouble creating such a workflow in Sharepoint. It only provides single initiation form by default. The form would close as soon as the data was entered and "OK" selected. The next step would be for a user to go to the list of tasks and open a task.
Creating a form with tabs which would stay on screen and interact with the workflow, is a problem for us which we need to solve.
Answer:
This depends on what they are looking to do. If they are wanting one form with individual tabs that progress multiple tasks, this would not be recommended. Currently task forms are created for each individual task within a workflow and are linked to the associated tasks in the task list, so doing this would require a fair amount of custom JavaScript. Using individual task forms could capture this data for each stage of the workflow though.
If they are wanting to keep one form open and submit data in the form while the workflow is running, they can use a combination of the ‘Save and Continue’ button (after each tab is completed), and a ‘Wait for Item Update’ in the workflow that will proceed after a field is completed or set to a certain value. The one caveat here, is that if they are wanting the workflow to populate the form data in the next tab, then they will need to use a ‘Save and Submit’ button, so the form can be reloaded after the workflow has completed the requisite steps. This will close the form but this could be used in a situation where the choice field for the tabs is linked to a SharePoint column and is updated by the workflow.
The blog post below should be helpful for providing more info on the ‘Save and Continue’ button:
https://community.nintex.com/community/tech-blog/blog/2017/03/08/marching-in-formation
Additionally, I’ve included the help file documentation for the ‘Wait for Item Update.’
