Nintex Workflow – Fast Loops

Recently I needed to create a schedule of dates, one week apart. I created a loop and added 7 days in each iteration. I noticed it took a very long time, so I added a Log in History task in the loop and saw that each iteration was taking 5 minutes. I realized that this was down to ‘Safe Looping’.

This protective feature places some safety measures against the hazards of an infinite loop by adding a hidden delay..

I didn’t want to disable this option, mainly because of the maintenance overhead involved, so I looked for another option.

I realised that the Collection iteration (For Each) didn’t have any such restriction, so all I needed was to create a collection with the number of entries that I wanted to loop for.

The Regular Expression task with the Split operator is the easiest way to create a collection; it simply splits text based on a character. All I had to do was to create a string with the right number of delimiters.

This is where I got the idea for this article https://community.nintex.com/community/build-your-own/blog/2018/06/08/nintex-string-repeat.

Now, as n delimiters will create n+ 1 entries, we need to reduce the number of delimiters by 1

Initialising the string to a non-delimiter will ensure that the string is padded to length ‘Iterations’ containing n-1 delimiters.

Regular Expression

For each

We place the retrieved value in TempStr variable and ignore it.

Calculate date:

Here’s where we add the recurrent +7 days added on each loop

The final workflow

I set the Iterations variable to be a startup parameter and set it to 10

Here are the results from the history - as you can see, it all executed immediately