Query List and Send Notification...too many?


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Hi,

I've got c550 employees working within my organisation, however only approximately 50 of us use our network with access to SharePoint. I wanted to find a way that enables us to be able to quickly email all staff (even on external networks).

After conducting some research, I managed to do this by having a list of every employees name, department and email address. I created a new workflow on an 'Announcements' app that used 'Query List' to get all those email addresses into a variable and then a 'Send Notification' that takes the title and body of the announcement, puts it into an email and sends it to that variable.

This initially worked (even with an attachment) but after doing them a second and third time I started getting the 'workflow failed to start' error causing me to end the workflow. This happened several times - with and without attachments.

Originally I thought the amount of email address were too large for the workflow to handle so I broke it down via departments and had a separate 'Query List' and 'Send Notification' for each department. Tried the workflow again but got an error at the a random department - I had a look in depth at this and nothing obvious was causing any issue. I played around a bit with it by disabling and enabling the workflow items, when I had it so just that department was enabled it worked fine...however another department then stopped working (with very different amounts of emails). There doesn't seem to be any continuity in this error.

Has anyone had any experience in something similar to this that can make any recommendations?

Thank you


4 replies

Userlevel 5
Badge +14

do you have any other actions in the workflow before these two?

do you store query list result into a collection variable?

have you checked query list really populates addresses into a variable?

have you proofchecked all the mail addresses are valid? (sometime even an extra space or (semi)colon cause problems)

do you start workflow automatically or manually?

do you gave configured any start conditions?

Badge +4
  • There are no actions in the workflow before these two, just 'Query List' and 'Send Notification'
  • Yes, they're stored as a collection variable
  • Yes, done a thorough check of this (I had it export it to me in an email) and they all appeared correct without any issues.
  • Before I started the workflow with a condition but whilst I'm 'playing around' with it I'm starting them manually.

Another workflow on my SharePoint site that was previously working fine has also been throwing up errors which is making me think there might be a problem with the actual site rather than individual workflow/application. I've raised it with our IT team and will update accordingly.

Userlevel 5
Badge +14

yeah, sort ouot infrastructure problems first

Badge +4

Just to update-

I discussed this with our IT helpdesk and due to there being too many names/emails on the list this is where it is breaking down. As a result, I have scrapped this idea and focused on another solution that doesn't use Nintex.

Harry

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