How to Capture Approval Comments in Nintex Forms List in Workflow Action - Start a task process

[#1]

Hi All,

Could anyone let me know the steps with example how can we capture approval comments in NIntex Forms List Column in case of  Workflow Action - Start a task process.

Additional Task Process Configuration details:

Assignment Behaviour: Parallel (all at once)

Completion Criteria: Wait for first response

Thanks in advance.

[TomaszPoszytek · Accepted solution]

In O365 there is no such functionality as "ApproverComments" - field that was by default in on-premise Nintex. So there is no like OOTB solution.

I recommend to alter Nintex Task content type and to make the "ApproverComments" field as visible.

Then, after the "task process" is completed, you can query the tasks list to get all items, where "Instance ID is equal {WorkflowContext:InstanceId}" so that you will get a collection of all tasks created by the current workflow. Then you just need to output "ApproverComments" field into a collection variable, foreach it and its done

Regards,

Tomasz

[shaunlub]

Tomasz, this is a requirement for myself, too. But without know what actions are being used here, it would be difficult to start. I'd be grateful for anything you could provide. (I'm quite a visual person. I've not done anything with arrays in Nintex, at all...yet).

Cheers.

[TomaszPoszytek]

Just to assist you with that - Nintex said they will add this functionality sometime in future, but... it's not on a critical path, neither planned within any specific timeline

So again (sorry, no visual, don;t have much time now):

1. Go to the "Tasks" list settings and then click in the "Nintex" content type that is used by your workflow (to determine that simply add "Content Type" column to the default view of the tasks list and see which is used by the tasks you want to get comments from). Once your in the Content Type details, click "Add column" and choose to add from the existing site columns. Under the "Nintex" group you will find the "ApproverComments" column. Add it.
2. After your "Start a task process" action is completed, add "Query List" action.
3. In the action set the filter: "Instance ID is equal to {WorkflowContext:InstanceID}" - so to compare attribute present on the tasks list with the parameter from your workflow's context.
4. Return the value from "ApproverComments" into the collection-type variable.
5. Add "Foreach" action, configure it to use the collection from step no. 4 as the input, return current value into a text variable.
6. Add "Build string" action inside the loop, so that with each run you need to append the value of the text variable from step no. 5 to a "final" text variable, that you use for all comments concatenation.

And simply that's it. After the loop finishes you will receive a variable with all comments inside.

Regards,

Tomasz

[shaunlub]

Thank you very much. I will give it a try.

[shaunlub]

I gave it a try; could not get it to work. After adding logging actions all over the place, I see the issue is with the For Each and Build actions. But I am unsure how to fix that.

After the approval and query, I logged out the comments collection which showed both input comments had been pulled from the tasks list successfully. But Comments Holder logs shows that this text var did not get the comments value for any of the iterations of the for each, and subsequently the Comments variable used to pull them together was also empty.

I can't see what I'm doing wrong here.

[TomaszPoszytek]

Can you also post a screenshot of how the "Foreach" action is configured?

[shaunlub]

CommentsCollect is a collection workflow variable

CommentsHolder is a text variable

Not sure is needed but saw it used elsewhere (but it does not affect the result either way)

Many thanks!

[shaunlub]

sorry - not sure Index was needed but added it anyway

[TomaszPoszytek]

But for some reason it seems that what you return from "Comments Collection" is also a collection. Maybe try to output it not as a text, but as a collection and then get the "1st" element as the sub-collections have two items.