News and Guidelines

Question:  I’m trying to make task due dates dependent on the day the task notice is sent, so that if a completed task approval leads next to an additional task being created for someone else, and that 2nd person has 3 days to complete it, I’m expecting to find a way to make the Due Date = (Task Creation Date) + 3. Is there a way to program that?  Answer: In the Approval Branch for the initial task, add an “Add Time to Date” action and set it to 3 days with the date set at ‘Use date when action is executed.’ From there you can configure the task due date in the next Task to use the workflow variable you created in the previous action. 

This is just information published on the SharePoint 2016 help page  The following form controls are supported for use in Nintex Mobile form layouts. Attachments controlBorder controlCalculated Value controlChoice controlDate/Time controlGeolocation controlHyperlink controlImage controlLabel controlList Lookup controlMulti Line Textbox controlPage Viewer controlPanel controlPeople controlRepeating Section controlSingle Line Textbox controlYes/No control

This list is based on information published on http://help.nintex.com/en-US/nintex2016  External Data Column controlThe External Data Column control enables users to add data from external content types to standard SharePoint lists. Just like an external list, the external data column can display data from any configured external content type. Change Content Type controlThe Change Content Type control enables users to change the content type for a list item in a SharePoint list where there are multiple content types on that list. The control populates itself based on the context of the list. At runtime it relies on the form being run in edit full desktop mode and hence will not work when running in mobile mode. Web Request controlEnterprise Edition for Nintex Forms 2016 is required for this feature.The Web Request control allows you to look up data using external web services. Use this control to populate form fields using data managed in business applications and cloud services. Call

The June Mission is your opportunity to show us how you'd build a workflow for the following: Scenario:A service team has a SharePoint list where users submit requests that they need to fulfill.  There are currently 5 different types of requests that they can receive and each request type has between 20-30 steps that have to be completed in order to fulfill the request.  The team has been having some difficulty keeping track of the status of each request and knowing whether all of the steps have been completed or not.  This has led to some request falling through the cracks and the users are none to happy about it.  The current request types are:Inventory Campaign Collections Statements Audit This is a sample list of steps for an Inventory request.  Each request type will have it's own unique set of steps.Step # Description 1 Create master schedule 2 Notify the affected departments 3 Purchase supplies 4 Clean all areas for counting 5 Group like items 6 Ensure there

Hi all, Ever wondered how many document generations are already consumed and what your limit is? There are 2 options:This information is written in the Workflow History when using the document generation action. Create a workflow, put the document generation action on the canvas, open it and voilà (see screenshot below).  Cheers,Rick ‌

It has already been announced couple of months ago, during the Nintex inspirex 2017 conference in New Orleans, in February this year, by Vadim Tabakam and Brad Orluk during their presentation "Extensibility on the Nintex Workflow Platform" and later on Nintex Blog. The new, cool feature (that now is in beta preview), called "extensibility framework". The tool that is allowing customers to add to the nintex workflow cloud a custom REST API endpoints, that are "encapsulated" into ready-to-use actions. How does it work?Nintex Xtensions - the basicsIn 3 steps:Obtain your custom rest apijson file with the swagger definition or provide a URL to a Swagger definition. Create new connection if your endpoint requires any kind of authentication. That's it - now you can use actions built on functions defined in the Swagger file. Step by step howtoI will try to present you how to do it. This tutorial is divided into 2 sections. First shows how to create a Swagger file, if your REST API doesn't prov

Following on from the success of January 2017 Mission‌ "What is your Nintex New Years Resolution", which was all about what bad habits you have when using Nintex that you would like to dispel of, we have created a positive spin in this months mission! So what do you have to do to get the loot?  Simple really, share your quick top tip for any of the products in the Nintex suite, easy right?!  A simple couple of lines as a comment below about your top tip will do the job.  For your trouble, you pick up the badge pictured, and 100 points! Why are we doing this?  In the hope that your top tip might be something that users in the community have never even heard about - and imagine if you could save them time and less headaches by simply sharing yours...   Here is mine:  Use the "Log in history list" action.  Simple enough I know, but for the first eight months of developing workflows I didn't know it was there and I used to bombard myself with emails trying to debug my workflow and get the

The Nintex App Studio feature App Deploy lets you deploy apps without using an MDM.Instead, after building your app, use Nintex App Studio distribution lists to send the app to your recipients' email address. The distribution list sends an email containing the link to download the app.  Optionally, you can view reports on your sent and downloaded apps. Currently, App Deploy is only supported by iOS and Android devices. To create a distribution listUnder the App Deploy tab, click Manage distribution lists. The App Deploy tab is accessible from the home page for all apps that are queued to build. Click Add on the Manage distribution lists page. Fill out the fields on the Edit distribution list page. You can copy and paste email addresses from most sources. Only valid email addresses are automatically extracted from the pasted text when you click Add Click the Nintex Mobile logo in the ribbon to return to the App deploy tab. To email your appUnder the App Deploy tab, select your distr

In Part 1 we explored the new Nintex SharePoint Connectors for our Domestic Animal Registration example and successfully published a Public Web Form and added our responses to SharePoint Online which triggered an internal review and approval process.  Part 2 is all about our backend process to save our users even more time and effort. Remember those paper / email received forms our Chris City Council workers received. Well once they've approved them internally they need to update a central CRM (Salesforce) by adding the record. They either do this by typing directly from that paper form or copy and pasting from the email received PDF. We also need to inform the member of the public that submitted the form and provide them with a Proof of Registration which is a council generated document that we also do manually. So let's get started. I'm going to create a backend process workflow in Nintex Workflow Cloud with the Start event of External start. This is going to allow me to initiate thi

The account being used for installation is important. During the installation, the process will deploy or updated dll's and binaries to the operating system at the permission level of that user. So checking these items on the checklist should help to prevent any issues while updating or installing Nintex products.  Checklist: 1: Check that the UAC setting for the account used is temporarily turned down. (You will need to do this on each server that makes up the SharePoint deployment excluding Exchange and SQL.) (Microsoft Reference)   2: Check that on-access scanning is turned off temporarily for SharePoint servers. There are many flavors of anti-virus, some impact and some don't on the installation process. To rule it out, temporarily disable it.    3: Check that the account has Farm Administrator and Local Machine Admin rights. This account will need local admin rights for all the hosts   4: The account will need SQL read/write access at the point you click update. In the background,

Based on the question Is it possible to look for conflicting schedule in calendar app?‌ risen by Rogelio Tan‌ I've built a small example workflow how to identify overlapping events in sharepoint's calendar list. Note: workflow works just on simple not recurring calendar events!  so this is how the workflow looks like and works.   first of all we need to identify set of events that we want to compare. so we query a calendar list with some reasonable filtering condition. for this demonstration I haven't used any filters.   we need to query for event's start and end times, plus some event identifier, eg. ID or Title. we save values for each queried fields to separate collection variable to identify overlapping events, we need to compare them each to other. so we will need two nested loops over collections returned from query above.   so we configure first for each loop over ID collection, and save current event's ID value and current index to a scalar variable

Good Day To all,I have been testing the water with nintex 365 and one of the things that I was interested in solve is the workflow history log for audit purposes. And then I have one more solution that could be helpfull.   1. I will create the example by using a simple list called (approval) with the following columns: Title(Single line of text), Approver (Person or Group) Status (Waiting for Approval, Approved, Rejected) this is type "Choice" and InstanceID (Single line of text) 2. The workflow is pretty straight forward (I will be uploading the workflow here ) 3. Once I have the list and the workflow working accordingly the next step is add some jquery script to pop up the workflow history log related to a specific item..    The script should be added by using the web part Content Editor: Find  the script and workflow attached: (remember change the URL related to your history log) ThanksWalter

First off, big shout out to Patrick Abel‌ for writing his blog: Sending Microsoft Teams notifications using Webhooks & the Nintex Workflow Cloud His blog was made aware to me by the ever responsive Bingham Blalock‌ as we were discussing ideas around Nintex Workflow Cloud and Microsoft Teams. I had done what Patrick details in his blog while exploring different ways to connect Nintex and Teams. The thought is to create a connector within NWC so that you can easily add in an action and connect to any Team conversation (like Slack). Before you get your hopes up, this is not a blog announcing a Teams connector for NWC... not yet! I wanted to bring this topic to the attention of the community in the hopes of sparking some further conversations and brainstorming. Also, I wanted to show everyone that this is not just limited to Nintex Workflow Cloud. Since we are leveraging a web request action, just about any Nintex Workflow can use this! I did examples for this blog using Nintex Workflo

Workflows do fail. External forces or unforeseen conflicts arise and force us into troubleshooting mode. Deciphering the root cause of the workflow errors can be time-consuming. When it comes to delivering materials to a support team such as Nintex Support we want the most accurate information possible and we want to get it out the door quickly. To better respond to my clients needs for rapid workflow error remediation, I've come up with a PowerShell script which will process the ULS logs of an on-premises SharePoint farm, locate Nintex Workflow-specific correlation tokens, and output the series of ULS logs directly aligned to all workflow instances over the given time period, all automatically, with minimal input from you, the SharePoint/Nintex administrator.  Have a look! Usage Usage:To output one ULS log file for every Nintex Workflow instance reported in the trace log by SharePoint over a given period of time. Requires:SharePoint Management Shell/SharePoint PowerShell cmdlets. Para

Populating Repeating Section Controls with List Data Part 1: Creating the Form and ListsIn a post written by Vadim Tabakman, he showed us how to parse repeating section data in a Nintex Form using Nintex Workflow. Vadim’s clever User Defined Action (UDA) queries the XML in the repeating section, extracts the text and stores it in variables for later use by our workflow. This concept has proven invaluable on several workflows Synergy has built for our customers. But what happens when we want to do the reverse? In this scenario, say you want to create an onboarding form which automatically populates the controls within a repeating section with a new users’ default resources. This would include Resource Name, Description, and the administrator for a resource. The default resources will be dependent on the user’s role within the business, determined by their department. Challenges:We have a few problems to overcome. Controls bound to a column cannot store more than a single value, so repea

Home » Nintex » New Task list for Nintex Workflow tasksNew Task list for Nintex Workflow tasksSome Nintex workflow actions create tasks on the SharePoint site, for example both the Assign Flexi task and Request Approval actions create tasks. These tasks are by default created on the sites ‘Workflow Tasks’ list. If you would like all the tasks for a specific workflow to have it’s own tasks list, you can setup the Nintex Workflow to create it’s own Task list.Even Lazy Approval Flexi Tasks still create actual tasks on the site, the task list can be a great resource to review active tasks (i.e. tasks that have not been completed) or to review who approved which task and when.1. Open the existing workflow, click on the Workflow Settings option.2. Scroll down to the Task list section, select Create new… from the dropdown. Enter a name for the new task list for this workflows tasks.3. Save the workflow settings, publish the workflow.

Link to Nintex Hawkeye Webinar: Watch the Recording  Question: How much of today's topic is O365 vs on premises?Today’s webinar is around connecting to Hawkeye from either On-prem, O365, or Nintex Workflow Cloud. Once the connection has been made to either of the platforms Hawkeye is a single platform for all the Nintex products. The method of using beacons is the same across all the workflow products. So I believe Lachlan will show beacons in Nintex Workflow Cloud but the beacons work exactly the same in O365 as well. :) Question: Is Nintex Hawkeye included in Nintex 2013 or just Nintex 2016?Nintex Hawkeye supports Workflow 2010, 2013, 2016, O365 and Nintex Workflow Cloud. Question: We are already customers of Nintex 365, do we still need to go through setup of Hawkeye tenant?The tenants aren't automatically setup, and if you already have Nintex Hawkeye as part of your subscription, go through the trial sign up and the licensing will be done on the backend automagiclly  Nintex Hawkeye

That was basically the need of my customer who is heavily working with php and he wants to automate some stuff integrating some online services (including O365...and because now the Sharepoint Online connector is available, it opens a wide new range of capabilities!) Of course, you can kick an external start workflow from anywhere, any language, any platform, there is no problem with that, but maybe the syntax may not be obvious to everyone on any language. php... mmm it's been years I hadn't done any code in php . but it's like cycling, you never forget ! You don't need any specifi libraries, like zend or Curl. You can do that with native php.After a few tries...I got there.So, here is how you call an NWC external start workflow, from any PHP page. <?php$url = 'https://YOUR-EXTERNAL-START-URL-GOES-HERE'; $data = array("se_param1"=> "I LOVE THE PALESA'S HIP HOP FLOW","se_param2"=> "I said a hip hop the hippie the hippie to the hip hip hop, a you dont stop");$dataOpt = array("c

Question/Issue:  We have two country drop downs in two sections(connected to the same column) that we alternately show depending on the region, but the country value for US region is superseded by the EMEA region country value(blank), even when users are in the US region, and trying to save the form.  I see the country value is saved in the form, but it’s not surfaced to the view.  We were told to use a rule to disable the EMEA Country control, when US region country drop down is prominent. But we may have more than 2 regions, that use the same country control, and the work to add additional rules to the additional regions that are not prominent/active can and will compound. We are afraid that the potential future versions of Forms that may break these additional rules. Response:  I recommend disabling the controls based on rules will be the best option for their use case.  This will really be the only option if you are planning on using multiple controls tied to the same list column w

Hello there! I wanted to share some (hopefully) inspiring and thought provoking ideas. I was recently playing board games (Guess Who) with my kids and got to thinking, "How cool would it be to play a game, but using Nintex!?!? I could make a form that allows the user to pick questions from a drop down and then submit to a workflow and use a list to hold the features of all the characters...I should use the people on my team as the characters!!!!" ...and I got wayyy to excited over this  and dove into the form designer. So what do we do when this happens? Take a breath, and a step back. Start with the basics and build up. You can't start building the penthouse if the foundation isn't poured.  I landed on Tic-Tac-Toe, and not Guess Who, because it is a much more simplistic game and does not require too much to get it up and running. Also, there are some points functionality that can be used elsewhere. I kept the game to a single form to highlight just how simple and easy it can be to do

Hi Guys,my name is Ollie and I'm working since a half year with Nintex Workflows and Forms .I like them, but I'm tired of clearing the History every week. Especially when using the "Filter" actions the History is getting full and the WFs are getting in stuck.So I couldn't find s.th how to clear the history automatically, i decided to make a Workflow clearing the History automatically (may be there is somewhere a tutorial but i didn't find it!?). Now that is I made it with an time scheduled Workflow: 1. Create an new Site Workflow with the following Variables:   - List_Collection   - List (String)   - Yesterday (Date)   - ID_Collection   - ID (String OR Number)   - Index (Number) 2. Now that is how you should arrange the Items in your Workflow 3. Now you should go to the calculate Date and Calculate how Old the Entries should be to be deleted4. Go to " 'Site Settings' --> 'Manage workflow history lists' " (or you can type into your Browser "YOUR TEAMSITE/_layouts/15/NintexWorkflow/Ma

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) has always been a problem for those who create SharePoint Solutions and need to include the Nintex Workflows & Forms within their final packages. The traditional way of doing it was deploying WSPs and then moving the different Workflows & Forms by exporting them from the Dev environments and importing them to the target ones (Testing, Staging, UAT, Prod, etc...). I've also seen some developers using the SDK to create features that take care of deploying & publishing the different Nintex artifacts. I've explained how to automate the full process (like the above figure" along with the way to apply the Continuous Integration & Continuous Deployment concepts during my InspireX session "Application Lifecycle Management for Nintex Solutions" and right after the session, I received a lot of requests to start sharing the scripts. This post is the first of a series and is going to deal with the first step towards Application Lifecycle Manag

Over the past few weeks I've had the question come up and whilst not a complicated process and there is information available in the Help . I thought I'd quickly put together a blog post that goes through the process of connecting your On-Prem SharePoint environment up to Nintex Hawkeye for the first time. This post assumes you already have your Nintex Hawkeye tenant provisioned, whether that is a trial or part of your subscription. If you need to get a trial head to Try Nintex for 30 Days - Free! Firstly log into Nintex Hawkeye and navigate to the "Nintex data sources".  Select "Add Nintex data source" - My this post I'm going to add a SharePoint 2013 source Download the installer package and if you aren't on the SharePoint server, copy it there. The installer needs to be installed on it.  Extract the Zip file. in there will be 3 files.  Deployment Guide Uninstall Script Executable Run the executable (Note, if you already have the Nintex Hawkeye collector installed, you can just r

Question: How do you keep lazy approvals functional as we migrate to Microsoft Exchange on Office 365 while maintaining our On-premises servers.    We plan to manage a hybrid environment and our goal is to configure Microsoft Exchange for Office 365 with our SharePoint On-Prem servers.  If we were to move to Microsoft Exchange in Office 365 today, and decommission our Exchange servers, lazy approvals would fail to work.    We would like to maintain continuity between Microsoft Exchange on Office 365 and SharePoint On-Premises.  How can we achieve this? And what are the steps we need to take to accomplish this? This is a high priority issue and your assistance on this will be greatly appreciated. Answer:  You will need to ensure that incoming email is functional for their SharePoint farm.  In order to do so, you will need to configure a connector within O365 to route the messages appropriately to their on-premises environment. The articles below should provide some more information on t

Nintex Hawkeye:  The OData (Open Data Protocol) is an OASIS standard that defines the best practice for building and consuming RESTful APIs. The API allows you to access your Nintex Hawkeye data in a machine-readable format for use in your favorite analytic tool. The API uses the OData protocol which follows standard patterns for request and response headers, status codes, HTTP methods, URL conventions, media types, payload formats, and query options. IBM Cognos Analytics Documentation: OData Version 4.0  The TM1 REST API provides clients with an interface that conforms to OData Version 4 to use HTTP messages to query and edit data in a TM1 model. The OData set of standards provides a solution to the problems of data silos and provides a web and cloud oriented approach to data exchange built upon web standards and conventions such as HTTP, REST, XML, and JSON. OData providers support a uniform way to model data and its entities and relationships between entities. A common mechanism for