List Lookup of Local Lists

  • 5 October 2022
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In Nintex for O365 there is an option to use SharePoint Lists in a drop-down or as radio buttons with it being filtered based on an expression (that can reference the value of other Nintex fields in a complex expression or variable using intrinsic functions) with the ability to show unique values only.

 

How to implement Local Lists (stored in the tenant and does not rely on SharePoint at all) with filtering and unique value presentation capability?

 

This way it's very fast, doesn't require SharePoint nor SQL, and most importantly, it would support cascading listboxes.

 

For example with 3 dependent listboxes you can select Country --> Province --> City. Selecting the Country will cause the Province listbox to show only provinces from that country. Once the country and province are selected, only cities from there are listed. Changing the province choice will clear the city choice. Changing the country choice will clear both the province and city choices.

 

Euan Gamble's (former Nintex Forms senior product manager) video on the List Lookup control from October 1, 2020 shows how it works in Nintex for O365. What is quivalent cloud feature with no dependency on any external data sources outside of the tenant?

 

The link here takes you to the exact point in the video that demonstrates in Nintex for O365 for what I'm trying to accomplish in NWC: https://youtu.be/hEiZREoKVF0?t=357


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Hi @v-tmasenko,


 


Nintex Automation Cloud does not provide "store data" capacity in the tenant. NOT YET. Storing data (business-related data) is only possible outside Nintex


 


Nintex never did within Nintex for Office 365. Data were stored on SharePoint lists which make it transparent for end-users.


 


With that being said, within Nintex Automation Cloud you can implement different dropdown lists that refers to SharePoint lists (and more as it is not limited to SharePoint lists) with cascadings capabilities. It is supported and it works. 


 


What is not possible is to have the lists "local" stored inside Nintex. I would not recomment maintaining a list (specifically when the list should be dynamic and large) within the form using the native control single choice and where I agree you don't have the filtering options. Those reference lists should be outside the form.


 


I can see that you already submitted the feature request in our Nintex ideas site: List Lookup of Local Lists with filter expressions and | Nintex Ideas. Great!


 


Hope that helps.


^^

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The reason we're switching from Nintex for Office 365 to Nintex Automation Cloud is that we're migrating from Microsoft (SharePoint) to Google Workspace (Google Sheets, etc). So referencing SharePoint in Nintex Automation Cloud is not an option.

By using Local Lists with expression filtering capabilities referring to other form values within Nintex, we should have the equivalent solution.

Within Nintex Automation Cloud, the native control single choice has a limit of 20K characters and has does not have an expression filtering capability referring to other form values within Nintex.

On numerous occassions, I was told by Euan that Nintex for Office 365 and Nintex Workflow (now called Automation) Cloud shared the same back-end code. So, if the Office 365 implementation can do this using SharePoint as the data source, can't Nintex Automation Cloud be updated with the same capability but use Local Lists as the data source?
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Hi @v-tmasenko ,


 


I don't know what you mean by "local lists" in Nintex for Office 365. Is it the List Lookup control ? If yes, it is similar to Data Lookup control within Nintex Automation Cloud. List lookup refer to a sharepoint list only whereas Data Lookup refer to any external system (available through connectors) SharePoint included. 


 


Regarding the Single Choice control, available on both Nintex for Office 365 and Nintex Automation Cloud, it's the same control with same limitations (No filtering options and limited to 20k) if we compare Responsive Forms. There's no classic form with advanced capabilities (Javascript) yet within Nintex Automation Cloud. This is something on the roadmap for this quarter named as "Forms extensibility".  Nintex Roadmaps 


 


I think what you're requesting is something NEW to have data managed within Nintex (the application style with data structure, views, forms, etc.) instead of loading from external systems. This is something Nintex works on.    


 


I understand that you're switching from SharePoint to Google. Keep in mind that SharePoint list are not comparable with Google sheets in many points. If you would like to get the list loaded from Google sheets I would recommend to wait the "Form extensibility" feature that is coming soon.


I investigated how to get data collection loaded from Google sheets within the form and unfortunately due to the response format of Google Sheets API and also the fact that Nintex Automation Cloud do not support yet arrays of arrays data within Nintex Automation Cloud forms it is not possible without some kind of development/payload to transform the response format. Possible with payload development.


 


I hope this helps. 


^^

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Local Lists was demonstrated March 1, 2022 at the Nintex Processfest. It looked functional and appeared to be released soon.

The Data Lookup control for Google Sheets just lists the first 75 files. I need to refer to a specific file, sheet, named range and use a filter based on an expression that references other values dynamically selected elsewhere on the Nintex Form. Attempting to use Google Sheets as the listbox data sources is an attempted workaround using whatever controls are available.

Using Local Lists as the listbox data source (with expression filtering capability) is the best SharePoint independent design because the data, filtering and form would be totally in the Nintex tenant. Fastest self-contained most reliable tier.

I'm just looking for feature parity in Nintex Automation Cloud (NAC) versus Nintex for O365's ability to use SharePoint as the data source with expression filtering and cascading listboxes in a Nintex Form.

Within NAC workflow, doing a "Get cell data" operation from Google Sheets returns an array of arrays. Unfortunately, Nintex's expressions cannot handle referencing elements of the array. Consequently, complex Regular Expressions are necessary to achieve the equivalent. I'm hoping that when NIntex releases support for element-level handling of array of arrays (aka multi-dimensional), it will be usable not only in the workflow but within the Form as well. This way operations like cascading listboxes can handle not only hierarchical data but large data sets with pagination.

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