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On-premise customer, trying to Question:On the web service action, what is the replacement for getting external data into a site for use on a form? Let’s say we have a customer list in oracle or SQL on prem. How do we get that list to a site to be used in a drop down on a form? Especially when it might be used across multiple sites and multiple site collections and must be up to date? Answer from Brad OrlukThe absolute best approach here would be to use BCS in SharePoint to surface that Oracle data in an external data column. This way we show it in the form using our BCS control. Otherwise, they would need to use the Web Request / Execute SQL action in workflow to pull the data from the database and put it into a list and then use a list lookup for the dropdown. This would need to be done as a scheduled workflow so that the data in the list stays relatively up to date with what’s in the database. Answer from Dan BurkeFrom what I looked into, what looks like the only way to do this onli

This post is a review of the march 2017 release. What is included in this post is my personal observation/opinion. *** Nintex Workflow Cloud ***ChangesAddition of ‘Conditional start’ feature. Addition of ‘Share a link’ feature. A new connector action. Addition of ‘Conditional start’ featureThis is my favorite release feature. Keep on going with the good work! If this feature is available depends on the connector. I have not found a list about it but it can be easily checked. The available conditional start options depend on the connector and event. The Nintex connector does not have a conditional start but connectors like ‘Dropbox Business’, ‘Microsoft OneDrive for Business’ and ‘Twilio’ do. Below is a screenshot of a conditional start (Microsoft OneDrive for Business):   Do check if your requested conditional start is indeed possible. So has the option ‘Size (bytes)’ (Microsoft OneDrive for Business) no ‘greater than’ or ‘smaller than’ option making this start event variable a bit use

I have been doing a lot of "selling" Nintex to different business areas within my company lately as we gear up for the ever-looming exodus to "The Cloud", and have faced the same question more times than I really thought I would have. "What is Nintex?" The question is simple enough, and I could go on for hours about it, but how do you sum it up in a sentence, or a word? When you think of Nintex, what jumps to mind? What is your "elevator speech" for Nintex? I have heard everything from "they do workflow and forms, right?" to "they do some stuff in the SharePoint space", but that hardly does Nintex any justice. For me, I always gravitate towards "improvement".  From existing workflows and processes to forms, it is a tool for improvement. It allows us to improve how we do our day-to-day as well as changes the way we look at approaching existing and new ventures. I think about how I can incorporate a process into other areas of the business using Nintex and how it will improve the overall

Well hopefully you have already had a quick look at It's here... Nintex Document Generation and had a play around with the Doc Gen action in Office 365. With this post I'm going to go a little deeper and try to explain how to get repeating section data from a Nintex Form into a table in a document. Kok Koon Gan​ just posted a great post as well detailing Using Document Generation to create Excel Report from List Items​. Continuing on from It's here... Nintex Document Generation  I'm going to use the same example and template, but just change it up, just a little. The thing you have to get in your head early in this process is that to have a table in a document you have to build up a collection of data that can be inserted in.. Now for those of you that have worked with Collections, you'll know that it is just an array.. Eg One, Two, Three, Four etc. So knowing this, how do you get multiple columns into a table ? We have dictionaries, these are close to what we need, but we can't use th

In this blog post I’d like to show, how to use the Nintex Forms “Web Request” control together with the Google Distance Matrix API to automatically calculate the distance between two cities and the estimated duration for that trip.At the end the form will look like this (Edit mode):Setup Google Distance Matrix APIBefore the implementation of the SharePoint list and the Nintex form, some simple steps need to be performed, to be able to use the Google Distance Matrix API. The documentation of the Distance Matrix API can be found here: Developer's Guide  |  Google Maps Distance Matrix API  |  Google Developers The most important point is the generation of necessary API key, the process for this is described in the “Get a key” section of the documentation:After reading the documentation I configured the following request:https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/distancematrix/xml?origins=Hamburg+22763&destinations=Muenchen+80331&mode=driving&language=de-DE&key=*****************

Hi,I got the requirement to design a multilingual form the other day.Thanks toVadim Tabakman‌ for describing a good way to realize such a form.Since my customer is thinking about translating the whole SharePoint-Plattform, Oceanik came into discussion.Unfortunately, I haven't found any discussion about Nintex Forms and Oceanik in combination yet so I decided to share my learnings here. To learn about the capabilities of Oceanik, please visit their website here: OCEANIK for SharePoint 2010, 2013 and 2016 - Oceanik    First, I installed Oceanik on my test environment and activated it on a plain SiteCollection. For this test, I translate terms from Englisch to German.To check whether the solution is working or not, I put "Go-Live" on my homepage. Now I can switch between the two languages and see the result. So far so good.As you can see in the left navigation, I also created a list called "Expenses" and translated that to "Spesen". Now for my next test, I use the term "expenses" in a lab

Set Workflow Variable is a fundamental workflow action that allows you to assign a value to a variable, based on the current place and decisions made in the workflow process. You could always create multiple variables within the action, but up till now you could only set one variable at a time.  This approach meant that every time you wanted to set a variable value, you would need an individual instance of the Set Workflow Variable action. For instance, if a workflow had 2 variables (discount price and sales value) that were set in 2 different process stages(proposal and negotiation), you would have had to use 4 instances of this action. This also meant you required a lot of canvas space in the workflow designer.   You may have noticed all the past tense in this discussion. That’s because new enhancements of the Set Workflow Variable action now allow you to assign values to up to 20 variables. Revisiting the earlier scenario, if the workflow designer needs to set 2 variables progressiv

You can now assign taxonomy during form submission, in the cloud! Nintex Forms for Office 365 is introducing the new Managed Metadata Control that allows you to do just that. This control allows consistent allocation of metadata, in a form submission context. This results in improved content discoverability and metadata enabled navigation to underlying lists and libraries.SharePoint’s Managed Metadata is information about information. For example, a product’s type identification number and preferred location can be its metadata. You can organize the metadata structure in a way that makes sense to your business context and use metadata when aggregate or searching for the said item. For more information on this concept, read this introductory article on Managed Metadata in Office 365.Once you have setup your taxonomy, implementing the new Managed Metadata control in your form is simple. I will take you through a quick end-to-end textual/pictorial demonstration.We will start with the list

We've all been there haven't we? You've got a multi-stage workflow, your director has approved it, your manager has approved it, and then **ERROR** Something goes wrong. Maybe your next approver has left the company since the workflow was started, or there's an erroneous value in your variable that your SharePoint column won't accept. Either way, you've got into a position where you've already had approval from a director (or anyone) once, you don't really want to have to ask them again. On long running workflows this can be a real pain. So we introduced a setup that allowed us to "Pick up where we left off" (or were kicked off as the case might have been). The State Machine is a brilliant action for for these staged workflows that transition through a number of different states and the Switch Action allows us leverage these states. Take the following example:An item is created, to achieve approval it must go through 3 stages on a State Machine.Manager Approval Director Approval Task t

So, I recently realized that Nintex Forms caused attachments to download rather than open in Word/Excel Online regardless of the setting you have in the site collection. We had some users for which this wasn't acceptable. We toyed with the idea of giving them a document library and having them upload things there and then just link to them, but I really wanted to make this work more intuitively so I came up with this workaround.I took most of my workflow inspiration from Attachment links in 'Send e-mail'  by Rasmus Nielsen which was based on this SlideShare from Alan Richards. I made a few tweaks and then had to figure out how to nicely display it on the Nintex Form. On my list I created a Hyperlink Column for each Attachment "slot" essentially. I built my workflow to accomodate up to 4 attachments, so I added 4 Hyperlink fields, named Link to Attachments, Attachments2, Attachments3, Attachments4. Now, onto the workflow, first, these are all the variables I used:  And then, here's the

Prompted by Cassy Freeman‌ and this question raised by Chintan Desai‌, 2 workflow instance executes at same time‌, I thought I would share how I got around this very problem.My scenario is slightly different as I wanted the new reference number displayed on the new form for users info even before the record saved. Initially i thought us JavaScript to get the next number from the GenerateID list and then use workflow on save to increment the next number.This actually made Murphy's law (read the rest of the comments on the question!!) more likely to happen which was pointed out to me by Cassy Freeman‌ in a workshop so i had to come up with something else. Solution:When the new form is loaded use Javascript to get the next number and then increment by one and then write back to the GenerateID list immediately. This will ensure that the next number will be different and therefore no chance of Murphy getting his way!!! The fun part:Title field set to have a Client ID JavaScipt variable of v

As we know you can not open Nintex Workflow Designer for an UDA at Farm level in all versions of the product. So that begs the question how do we update an UDA at Farm Level if we need to change it? This is a question a Partner had and they shared their workaround with us. So I am sharing it with the community as I see it as being very useful. The official method is using two farms. Editing the UDA in Farm A at site level then publishing at Farm Level in Farm B. This is not particularly convenient for single farm deployments. The reason behind this is that for an UDA to exist in a farm it needs a unique ID. Creating UDA's at site level to import over the farm level ones does not work since they have different ID's.  Details on how UDA's are identified. The UDA has a unique ID and Static GUID      - These can be referenced in the Nintex Config DB under the UserDefinedActions table.  The workaround  In Nintex Workflow 2010, 2013 and 2016, you can circumvent this limitation by editing an

The much awaited Nintex Lazy Approval action for Office 365 SharePoint online is here making your approval process SUPER FAST! All we have to do now is to simply type 'Ok' or a few other accepted keywords (covers almost all words I could think of for saying yes or no) in the assigned task notification and hit SEND. Right from your inbox without going to your SharePoint environment.Here's something I tried and sharing for you to try in your cloud as well(weather permitting ofcourse - just kidding!)App Requirements:Your organization has purchased a few training resource licenses and your rock-star team of devs/engineers/architects/students/runners/movers/shakers...well you get the idea, want a process in place that will track requests allowing users to avail training for two weeks and then release the hold, so others can book the same.Solution:Create a list, setup a workflow, assign a task when resource is requested. Pause the process for two weeks, then continue the process by assign a

Good day, It's my first Blog here.  I will show you a Nintex "Feedback" form where I will add a panel to use it as a progress bar. The form contains a set of questions (Choice controls). I will use the following techniques in order to accomplish what I need: 1-CSS2-Bootsrap font (glyphicons-halflings-regular)3-jQuery Step 1: Let's create the form containing the following.   a-A random number of choices with the below settings: b-A panel (Our progress bar) with the below settings:Step 2: Download the glyphicons-halflings-regular font with the (.woff .woff2 .eot .svg .ttf) extensions:Step 3: Add the following JavaScript file (I named it "progressive.js") with the below code to the "Site Assets" library:Step 4: Add the following CSS file (I named it "progressive.css") with the below code to the "Site Assets" library:Step 5: Let's add references to the files in our form:Step 6: The "Site Assests" Library will look like:Step 7: My form will look like :Attached you can find all the needed fi

Updated Please refer to this KB article  https://support.nintex.com/Mobile/Other/How_to_expose_Nintex_Mobile_through_your_firewall Last week I was at the Nintex InspireX conference in Las Vegas, and I have to say that it was one of the better conferences I've attended in the last 9 or so years, since jumping ship from being a Lotus Domino guy to a SharePoint Guy. Now I'm not being bias being a Nintex employee, or because I was a speaker. As we were treated no differently than anyone else. It was the experience of everyone being open, and the accessibility of customers and partners for frank discussions. The feedback was constructive, which I truly appreciated, and I thank you all that attended that spoke with me and or any of my colleagues.. There were some golden nuggets of information I took away. One of these items was something I saw as soon as myself and Tim Walwyn presented the Nintex Mobile session on the first day. A lot of people approached me during the conference, and stated

Have you ever gained sudden ownership of an abundance of Nintex workflows and forms? I have - over 350 of them - huge, undocumented monoliths, tiny stand-alone notifications - it's a bouquet of Nintex goodness and for the most part I have wrangled the workflows into a state of subservience. Generally, I only interact with these when I need to: maybe there's an error, maybe there's a change request - that's when I swoop into action. But this story isn't about when things go well. This is a story of how on February 21st at 3:28PM, the click of a vague button on an inconspicuous page by a well-meaning end user cost me over 5 hours of work.   ...   What Havoc Did This Cause? This workflow resets all of the document number references for a project. This means that all of the document numbers generated after 3:28PM were erroneous and had to be changed via individual workflows on each record, which also have their own sub-processes to run.  Oh, and, I didn't find about this until the next day

Hi, I am working on a project where we need to identify and inspect underground workplaces in a mine. To do this we need to work through at least five levels of lookups trying to find a specific record out of more than 200 000. Here is an example of the lookup part of the form: I created a list for the lookup data with only three single-line text columns: ViewName, ParentID and ChildID. I then created indices on the ViewName and ParentID columns. The last piece of the puzzle was the views. I created a view for every list control: Every view displayed the three columns, but were filtered on the value of the ViewName column. Back to the form. I used a choice control displayed as a drop down control as I only had two values to choose from. Here is the control settings for the Level lookup: The five lookups all point to the same list. The Source view is the first "filter" as it breaks the list into five parts. The Parent ID is filtered by a Calculated Value control called fltShaft: The oth

In my scenario, I have two lists. The first list is called „Car marks and Product locations“, where I store car marks and the locations where they are produced.The second list is called „Car marks“, there I can create entries and choose between different car marks via a lookup column on my first list. The corresponding locations for the chosen car marks should automatically be stored in an additional column called „Product locations“.The workflow that identifies the corresponding values looks like this:First I use a „Set variable“ action to get the ID’s of the values that have been chosen in the lookup column „Car marks“ and store them in a variable called „varCarMarksLookupIDs“.At this point it’s important to mention that I choose „Lookup IDs, Comma Delimited“ as the format for the values I store in the variable.Then I use a „Regular expression“ action to split the single IDs and put them into a collection variable called „vCarMarksLookupIDsCollection“.Now I’m using a „For each“ actio

Sometimes I needed to cancel all workflow on a specific list. The following powershell script will help you to do this. #Site URL $web = Get-SPWeb "http://urlforsite.com"; $web.AllowUnsafeUpdates = $true; #List Name $list = $web.Lists["ListName"]; # Iterate through all Items in List and all Workflows on Items.         foreach ($item in $list.Items) { foreach ($wf in $item.Workflows) { #Cancel Workflows        [Microsoft.SharePoint.Workflow.SPWorkflowManager]::CancelWorkflow($wf);      } } $web.Dispose();

Good day, We have not implemented this yet but I thought I would share it with you so long. SharePoint with Nintex Workflow, Forms and Live allows you the opportunity to create an in-house e-recruitment solution without having to spend money on some of the other companies out there. First Step:Decide on the fields that you would like to capture information about. This list of fields would be the basis for your form.I created all the fields as part of a Custom list on my SharePoint site. Second Step: Build the FormThen I started editing the Nintex Form for this list.  Move the fields according to your preference. and add repeater sections for the information that might have multiple different entries. I also forced certain settings on the attachment field.  There has to be a minimum of 1 attachment and I limited the attachment to certain file types. Third Step: PublishThen I enabled the Publish to Live which will create this page for me in the Nintex Cloud and return a URL to this form

Good day, We had a request from our Human Resources Development (HRD) department to have the ability to request confirmation from external training providers for booked training sessions. The emails were going everywhere and it was almost impossible to keep track of the training sessions and their confirmations. We suggested a two list solution to address the requirement:First list is where any of the training administrators can add a training intervention with the details of the external training provider.  The workflow starts as soon as the new item is saved.  It then generates a unique code (Item ID  + Company abbreviation) and sends and email to our HRD Training Manager.  After she approved the external course request and email is sent to the External training provider.  In this email there is the unique code generated as well as a link to a Nintex live form (discussed in next step). Second list is the list with a Nintex Live form linked to it.  The external training provider will

I recently decided to take it upon myself to really push Nintex in our company and spread the good word of what it is capable of. I realized that this would require training on Nintex, but also on SharePoint and process in general. Below is what my initial approach has been thus far! SharePoint, and Workflows, and Forms, Oh My!For some, SharePoint is exciting, but for others it is dreadful! Many users have a predisposition to it and use it for specific purposes. My first step is to discuss SharePoint at a high level and give them a broad view of its capabilities. This allows me to segway into workflows, forms, and process; all of which ties in Nintex. This also lets me understand the level of exposure to these areas and what I need to focus a bit more of or glaze over if needed. Understanding SharePoint and ProcessesI like to ask questions and get participation from my audience so it keeps them engaged and thinking. I generally ask the following to get it started:How much exposure to S

#sharingiscaringWe had the opportunity (and pleasure!) to have one of our customers speak at InspireX. As a follow up to the event, they were gracious enough to do a write up on how Salesforce and Drawloop combined together were able to empower their sales team, reduce their sales cycle, and make their lives just a lot easier! Hope you are able to find a few take-away's from this blog.Click on the here to link to the blog by Steve Thompson at Meritage Homes. Happy Reading!T

While the last post showed how to get an overview of all the sites, where the Nintex Workflow for Office365 App has been activated. The next question is: what workflows exist in the give site, and which of these workflows have been created using Nintex? And again PowerShell is going to help out! Add-Type -Path "d:Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.WorkflowServices.dll"$clientId = "client_id=" + [System.Web.HttpUtility]::UrlEncode($appPrincipalId)$wfmgr = New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.WorkflowServices.WorkflowServicesManager($ctx, $web)$wfdpl = $wfmgr.GetWorkflowDeploymentService()$wfdefs = $wfdpl.EnumerateDefinitions($false)$ctx.Load($wfdefs)$ctx.Load($web)$ctx.ExecuteQuery()$webUrl = $web.Url$items = @()$wfdefs | % {    $lauchUrl = $webUrl + "/_layouts/15/appredirect.aspx?"    $lauchUrl += $clientId    $lauchUrl += "&redirect_uri=" + [System.Web.HttpUtility]::UrlEncode("https://workflowo365.nintex.com/Hub.aspx?{StandardTokens}&ListId={" + $_.RestrictToScope + "}&AppVersi

If, like me, you don't want to give the users you support the opportunity to mistakenly (or mischievously) delete the list item whilst in the form interface, then this is for you.Just insert the following script into the Custom CSS box of the Form Settings, before the other CSS already in there (so, it's easy to find):On-Premise SharePoint 2013 Nintex Forms:/*hide delete button in ribbon for Display form*/#Ribbon.ListForm.Display.Manage-LargeMedium-1{display:none;}/*hide delete button in ribbon for Edit form*/#Ribbon.ListForm.Edit.Actions.DeleteItem-Large{display:none;} SharePoint Online 365 Nintex Forms:/*hide delete button in ribbon for Display form*/#Div1{display:none;} /*hide delete button in ribbon for Edit form*/#RibbonDeleteButton{display:none;}  I got this using a bit of trial and error based on previous posts I've seen elsewhere. Hope it is useful for others, too.