News and Guidelines

Nintex Forms for NWC was just released yesterday, and just in time for me to add a contact form to my new website (https://www.docfluix.com).  Matt Jennings‌ already posted an awesome intro for Nintex Forms for NWC so check this out to understand what this awesome new product is all about. Background InfoMy goal for my first Nintex Forms for NWC project was to create a simple web contact form (Name, Company, Phone, Email) and save the data to a SharePoint list. I also decided to add a multi-choice control named CustomerInterest to my form with the following options:Workflow / Business Process Automation Document Man

Please be advised that Nintex intends to fully comply with the GDPR, to the extent it is applicable to Nintex, and to provide GDPR related assurances in our contractual commitments, once the GDPR becomes effective on May 25, 2018. Until then, our Privacy Policy, https://www.nintex.com/company/legal/privacy-policy, and security disclosure, https://www.nintex.com/security, remain in full force and effect. We have not yet published a GDPR Compliance Statement as the ICO has indicated there may be additional guidance on GDPR compliance issued prior to May 2018. While we do not process or store any customer personal data, we acknowledge there may be situations in which we fall within the definition of a data processor. Like most

We are yet to purchase Document Generation and forever finding ways to produce documents from list items.  We also don't have Print to PDF for Nintex Forms as we are on standard license, so it all requires rather a lot of work.  Some of the options we have considered in the past are, but not limited to:Document library with columns and quick parts - passing the information from the list into the document library columns and using quick parts inside the document library to populate the document.  The workflow simply uses "create item" and adds the associated columns Document library with content controls - use create item from the list to create a document in a library, and then use "update document" action in the workflow to update the content controls SSRS reports - use reports to look at the list item data that can then be exported to word, pdf as required I recently tried both document library approaches to create a document using

This blog is dedicated to SharePoint on premise installations of the Hawkeye Data Collector in regards to Firewalls. The Hawkeye SharePoint data collector communicates to the cloud in a couple of ways.It talks to what we call the discovery API for commands, to register itself and request upstream endpoints to live events and workflow definitions. In production these urls are: 1. https://discovery.hawkeyecloud.com (port 443)2. https://wus-discovery.hawk

Retrieve User Profile Details on Nintex Form for Office 365Unlike the Nintex on-premise version , the User Profile Lookup function isn’t available yet in the Office 365 Nintex forms [Hopefully Nintex will add it in the future versions]. So here is a solution on how you can fetch the user profile properties using a custom JavaScript code. Please refer my blog-post Retrieve User Profile Details on Nintex Form for Office 365 [Step – By – Step] to view the step-by-step process.  Common Code (Add this code inside th

Recently I was working on a project, where a workflow was running through a list of reviewers and was assigning them tasks, but because there it was possible to have multiple tasks assigned to multiple users at the same time, it just wasn't possible to simply use the "Wait for task completion" configuration option. I decided not to use it and instead to use a "pause" action, so that after tasks are assigned workflow just loops and checks if all or any from the created are completed. And everything seemed ok, from the architecture point of view, however I realized, that my workflow is actually not... pausing! I tried recreating the pause action, moving it to a different location in the workflow - nothing seemed to help. Finally I started to analyze how the workflow works, trying to understand why it doesn't pause, as in other workflows this action works fine, so that it cannot be related to any Nintex or SharePoint issues. What I realized a l

Summary When Hide formatting rules execute on a form, controls lose their placement. Symptom The below form contains a Choice control titled Colors. When ‘Colors’ is selected, either Red or Green will determine what controls show and what controls are hidden. Here is the Nintex Form in Design Mode: When Green is selected, the Multi Line textbox and two Single Line textboxes will be hidden:The second rule, "Hide Red", will hide the Single Line textbox 1 and the Single Line textbox 3: In Runtime, when the ‘Hide Red’ rule is selected, you will see how the bottom ‘Hide When

So, you want to save more than one field from a database query but you don't want to have multiple SQL Request controls in your form?  You can achieve this with a customized SQL query and JavaScript. In the query, concatenate the fields you want to use.  In this example, a pipe character ( | ) is used as a delimiter.  Set the Value field to your concatenated fields ("Details") and the Display field to a reader-friendly field for your users to select.Set the JavaScript variable name for your SQL Request control as well as the other fields you want to populate:Use the Custom JavaScript area in the Form Settings to retrieve the fields.  In this example, the SQL Request control is displayed as a Drop Down List, so the JavaScript uses the Change event to get the values and then populates the

Current Nintex Projects on Codeplex OverviewAlthough we have tons of features on Nintex workflows, there are also some public projects published on Codeplex that could help us adding functionalitites not available on the current actions.Here is the current list of projects on Codeplex. POWERSHELL NINTEX WORKLOW ACTIONThe “Execute PowerShell Script” action allows you to execute PowerShell scripts from within Nintex Workflow 2010 workflows. You MUST have Nintex Workflow. INFOPATH AND NINTEX WORKFLOW INSTALLER FOR SHAREPOINTThis project is a command prompt application allowing a

Let's be honest, people like to print things out. You know you do! Allow me to paint a picture... You just filled out that leave request form on your company's intranet and you simply can't resist clicking on print after you submitted it.  Why? Well proof, of course!  We want to be able to have a tangible snapshot of that form, perhaps to print out, on that fancy multi-function copier down the hall, to pin on the wall of our cubicle to help count down the days until our vacation or maybe to stick a copy as a PDF into your OneDrive for Business folder labeled Personal for posterity. But, even though that leave request form was created with Nintex Forms, your web browser made it look like a complete mess thanks to things like background graphics and navigation/menus from SharePoint showing up and even things like certain sections running over onto subsequent pages. Not ideal. But, it's okay... Thanks to all of those crafty so

This post intends to demonstrate how a JavaScript/JQuery function can populate a calculated value control dynamically within a Nintex Form. Accessing data by using REST API Service makes dynamic content compulsory. Here is the form view that shows unpopulated calculated value controls as following.  In order to resolve this issue, I have decided to force calculated values to be recalculated by JavaScript code.To accomplish this, we need to setup following steps.Define a textbox with the name of 'hiddenField' and set « Store Client ID in Javascript variable » to Yes and give the value of « Client ID Javascript variable name » as 'hiddenFieldPageID'. Then all our calculated values formula should be included with a reference to the textbox. In our calculated values, add a reference as a parameter that does not be used in our Javascript method. Ens

So I made a rooky mistake and thought I would share so that you can all see that I am only human too, and sometimes, no matter what experience you have working with certain technologies, oversights can be made...I had a very old solution (not mine) that used an InfoPath form and a workflow that run on all updates with a Run if action at the very beginning checking if the email flag was checked.  This had been working fine for a long time but the customer reported that they wanted the form slightly changed.In good old fashioned InfoPath style, it informed me changes had been made in the list that needed to be reflected in the form (and rather unhelpfully didn't elaborate on the changes).  I needed to add this change for the customer so I accepted and published.  User was happy for a day or so until they realised that one of the dropdown controls had become unbound...!I won't bore you with the details, but here is what I did.the column was missing for

Products: Nintex Forms 2010, Nintex Forms 2013SummaryDesigner wishes to hide the Form Footer when Nintex Form is in View or Edit Mode. ResolutionNintex Forms uses the 'nf-form-footer' class:The following CSS Class will need to be placed in the Nintex Form Settings > Custom CSS section of the Forms Designer: .nf-form-footer{         visibility: hidden !important; }

Sometimes as a developer usual channels don't work.  My colleague and I tried for several hours to extract a base64 file from a document library using "/_vti_bin/Lists.asmx" in a Nintex Web Service component.  We could see the correct SOAP output after using the internal run command. But alas, after compiling, the workflow, the web service returned nothing. Being a SharePoint Developer for over eight years, it was time to write a web service to talk to Nintex.  Since it had been awhile since I had written one, I turned to Google for help. To the rescue came Rob Windsor's Video and Blog on the Subject of creating a SharePoint Web Service: Creating a Custom ASP NET (ASMX) Web Service in SharePoint - YouTube

Many times we might have noticed an email notification saying, "A scheduled workflow failed to run. Check the workflow is not already running or in an error state". I recently faced this issue and my mail box was flooded with emails notifications.And there is no much information in the email except it is pointing to the workflow's schedule page and to workflow's status page.When checked ULS logs and found an exception, "Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: The sepcified user or domain group was not found". Then I check for the user who scheduled the workflow and that user was no more working and his id got removed.Fix: Open all schedule workflows's schedule and click "Save" with different user. Best practice: It is best practice to publish or schedule the workflows with a service account on PROD environment.Other details: 

Meltdown and Spectre present 3 different ways of attacking data protection measures on CPU's enabling attackers to read data they shouldn't be able to. (Scott Manley does a great job of explaining this YouTube Link)   So what is Software vendors doing about this? The easy point to control this kind of operation hack is at the operating system level. So the main place to block this hack is with a patch for the operation system (Microsoft has already release patches fo

Enterprise-level clients demand the highest quality of business continuity support for their solutions, and rightly so when they service hundreds of thousands of users. For this author, getting to work with one of them to setup Nintex Workflow 2013 in a highly-available environment was as fun as it was challenging. In this blog post I offer guidance for enterprise-class, highly available on-premises Nintex Workflow 2013 deployments using one or more off-site DR farms. TopologyOur topology is a standard two-farm solution with SharePoint Server 2013 Enterprise and SQL Server 2014 Enterprise. Farm A is our primary farm. Farm B is our disaster recovery farm. We can fail-over manually to Farm B if needed at a moment's notice. Fail-over cannot happen automatically, but planned fail-over can happen quickly without down-time and without data loss. Here are the basics: Farm A and Farm B are completely separate SharePoint 2013 farms ope

While Linkin' Tasks could certainly be the name of an amazing new alternative band, I would like to use this post to highlight a scenario that a fair amount of you may have faced while building a workflow: You assign a task to someone and wanted to get the Task ID or URL associated to the task itself while the task was pending but found out you can't! This seems to come up often when: People are building with a List Item first approach and want the ability to build the task item URL to embed in the initial form. This is not unlike using a single InfoPath form to drive the data collection and approval process or have users navigating in and out of the initial form often. There is a need to write the task URL to a another list, backend database, or LoB for increased 'findablity'. Now you may be thinking to yourself, "Just hold on a second... I can just

Scenario and requirement:In one of our project client was looking to add edit attachments in the course of running workflow. In task form you can drag the required fields (like text fields, dropdown fields etc) to edit directly (making some field level NINTEX configuration) but when you drag the attachment field in the task form you will simply get ‘True’ or ‘False’ value as a Boolean one. ‘True’ comes when you have attached any attachment in the original form during submission and ‘False’ if you not. You can’t even display the attachment/s in the task form by default NINTEX propertiesand so there is no question of edit at all. But we can display it by configuring some workflow components and ‘Web Service’ calls. So, the situation is bit complex if user wants to add/edit attachment fields in course of running workflow.Solution:One of the solution you can use is to put a link of the original form (Since ID of the original item you can access from inside the t

I'm excited to talk about the Base Form in Nintex Forms for Office 365.  This gives you the ability to create a base form for a site, that all your Nintex Forms will start from when you create them. Imagine having different sites in your tenant (HR, Finance, Development) and each one would like a slightly different logo and background color.  Now you can do this at the site level.  The result is simple branding that can done once and any future forms will start from that.  It also means that if you happened to have any custom JS/CSS in a form now, you can put that into JS and CSS files, link those into the base form so that your future forms will automatically link those in.  This results in single point of modification if any rebranding needs to be done, and all your forms will inherit it, rather than having to modify 100 form designs. First, make sure you have the latest version of the Nintex Forms for Office 365 app.  If you already have it, you can sk

If there was one piece of advice I could give you, it would be to wear sunscreen.  If there were two pieces of advice, it would be to wear sunscreen and come to xchange 2018.  You'll need that sunscreen in San Diego!  Think about all the Nintex-related things you do throughout the year: ask questions, attend user groups and other related conferences, attend webex updates and place support calls.  Lots of stuff right?  Well think of all that crammed into a couple of days.  That's what xchange is all about. I've attended the two previous Nintex conferences and come away from both full of motivation, ideas and a quest to make the world a better place through digital transformation. Let me start by telling you about one thing that isn't officially promoted: fun, fun and more fun!  Each day is jam packed with interesting topics that you will lean so much from but that's on

Ali G would be beside himself, if he knew what he could do with Nintex Mobile now. Booyakasha! And it is with great excitement I announce MASI (or Multi Account Sign In) support.. "Wat iz dis ?" you ask, well to put it plainly it means you can login to Nintex Mobile now and create your profile as mentioned here Nintex Mobile introduces Profiles, and adds Forms Based Authentication support​, and associate multiple logins under the 1 profile. Where this will come in super handy is when you have On-premise and O365 deployments and you want to be able to show forms in Nintex Mobile from both environments. Also for the admins, it means you can have your test account logged in and your prod account logged in, so you don't have to log in and out of the different environments when doing testing

Description:I have seen lot of developers like to put all the fields of original list inside the task form to give the exact look and feel/functionalities as like of the original form. This type of development have pros and cons from both side. Pros: The task and the original form is having the exact look so that user can't distinguish and also can view/update the original list fields from task form on the course of running the workflow. Also reduce the headache of developers to develop. It's cool.Cons: If we design the task form as like of original form, the size of the workflow get increased and consume more RAM during the run time. And if the instance of the workflow running inside the RAM get increased, its execution time, loading time etc. also get increased. Also mimicking all the task forms as like of original form, increase the development time and violates the re-usability principle. 

SummaryHow to configure a Rules to only validate if controls are visible. SymptomNintex Forms Validation will still trigger on hidden form controls, even though the control(s) was not intended to be validated. CauseThe below example shows a form with a Choice control used to show/hide a second panel. The second panel contains a Multi line text box that is required. A formatting rule has been created, which is applied to the panel control:Also, a Validation rule has been created to require data in the Multi text box:If the user is not required to show the second panel and tries to submit the form, they will still see the Validation error: 

There have been many occasions where I have mentioned how one could take geolocation (GPS) metadata, usually collected from a Nintex Form, and use that to find a physical address.  So, hot on the heels of a great blog post (Latitude and Longitude UDA from a clever fellow named Vadim Tabakman), I decided to put some of my thoughts down in a more concrete way by conjuring up this post and sharing with you all some pre-built workflow logic that will allow you to perform this kind of reverse geolocation lookup with Nintex Workflow without having to build it yourself! But first, let's go over some use cases for this kind of data. Then, a brief explanation of how to build this and, last