How to wait for a list element in a SharePoint List until it has a specific status in K2 Five Workflow

Hi Matthias,

Thanks for your question. 

You should be able to use the workflow start option for when a SharePoint item is Updated as shown here. You can then build a condition in the start action, to test if this updated item has an Approved status, along with other fields to identify the right item.

Kind regards,

Erwee

This is only part of the solution. It sounds like from your original post that you are already dealing with a workflow that is already started and are wanting to wait for the approval status to change. There could be a number of ways to address this and depend entirely on how you are structuring your current solution and your business requirements.

My first question is that if you are working with an existing workflow, which I would think you would be assigning a task in K2 and then would know the status of that task, why are you needing to wait on the value of a SharePoint item to change? Wouldn’t the workflow itself know if the task was approved? First glance it seems like you may be thinking about your solution from the wrong angle.

• What is causing / driving the change of status of the SharePoint item?

Let’s assume for a moment that maybe you have a team of people that are just routinely reviewing a SharePoint list for items they need to evaluate. What you could theoretically do is when you create the list item (assuming this is the appropriate point in the process to do this) check the “wait for external system” check box on the SmartObject item. This causes the smart object call to behave asynchronously and wait for some action of an external system before the process moves forward. Much like a Task step, but without people being involved.

You would need to add a column to your list to hold a Process ID value that would be updated when creating the list item. This is where the previous comment comes into play. You could create a second workflow that is triggered on item update, this update would start a second workflow, it would then evaluate for the status you seek, and if the criteria are met, make a call via K2 REST api to conduct an operation to “finish” the waiting SmartObject call using the Process Instance ID. 

There is also a polling pattern, but that is generally frowned upon due to unnecessary overhead on systems.

The primary takeaway is that there are some larger questions to be answered about how the solution is being architected that should be considered before an actual implementation recommendation can be offered. 

The short answer is that it is entirely possible, but for guidance on how does require a bit of a bigger picture discussion.