In my role as a sales engineer, I come across many unique use cases that are new to me but may apply to other organizations. The subject of this blog involves a prospect that wanted to have approvals as part of a workflow but route them based on the starting character of a string. The prospect was in Education and the administration of the school wanted to route approvals based on the starting character of a Student’s last name filled in a Petition Form using Nintex Workflow Cloud. There were a collection of counselors that oversaw students based on their last name starting with A-F,G-M,N-T, and U-Z. Doing this type of routing takes a bit of craftiness, but can be done using the following actions.
Apply a Regular Expression – This action is needed to extract the first character of the string. The input value should be the field/control from the Nintex form you want to use as the basis of routing. Type of expression should be set to ‘Extract’ and the pattern should be [a-zA-Z] which pulls each character of the string and put them as items in a collection. Set ignore case to ‘Yes’ and only store the first result into a new text variable.
Parallel Paths – This action is used to break out the different groups of last names; A-Z, G-M etc. Using other actions, you can evaluate the first character of your string and run any approvals.
Run If True – This action will evaluate the first character of the string from your variable and match it against a range of alpha characters. There should be 1 ‘Run If True’ action for each branch in your parallel path action. Put your first character variable in the ‘When’ field. Select ‘Matches Regular Expression’ in the ‘Operator’ field. And the range of characters in the ‘Value’ field formatted as a regular expression. Example: [A-F], [G-M] etc. This value should correspond to the branch of the parallel path your ‘Run If True’ action is in.
After the actions above are set, you can place any approval actions and other relevant actions inside of the ‘Run If True’ action. These actions should only run if the starting character of the string aligns with the range of characters in the ‘value’ of the ‘Run If True’ action.
