Nintex Forms: List Lookups to populate form data - A proper explanation, please.

  • 10 February 2015
  • 7 replies
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I am struggling to understand how the List Lookup works in Nintex forms 2013. I have a list of Departments with staff members in ascending levels of authority in the columns. From a pull-down containing the Departments (from the Approver's list), I want the form to pull in the staff members names (from the other columns in the Approvers list) on to the form to be saved for the later approval process. Linking the lookup control to the source list seems simple enough. But getting the information from other columns in that approver's list on to the form does not work. Is there any setup I am missing on the lookup control, on a form variable, or something else. Examples I have found seem to always have the ID column in the lookup function - is this essential (it's not explained as such)? InfoPath does this very well. But I really want to know how it works in Nintex and to use it. I have scoured this site and the internet. There is very little detail on how this works.


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Has this functionality been added/improved out of the box now?

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This functionality was added last July. And very useful, too.

Under Runtime Functions: Lookup

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I have been using lookup, however it is not really solving my problem. I dont know if I'm not thinking properly or if I'm missing something but I have not been able to solve this. Can someone throw me a bone here ??

So, what i have been doing so far is searching or querying from my list, found whatever it is i want and displaying an error message or something, but HOW is it that i can populate other fields or controls based on what i found using a lookup from a calculated field ???

Any help would be appreciated.

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Roberto,

I don't think 365 Nintex forms support lookups from calculated columns yet. My advice is to create a small (on-modify) workflow on the source list, that will copy the calculated column content to a text column, which can be loaded using the lookup functionality.

I use this quite often actually.

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My understanding on workflows is that they belong to a single global queue in my sharepoint, so if there is more workflows waiting to be excecuted, mine would just be at the end of the line and would have to wait to be served. This presents a problem because one of my coleagues for example has a workflow that actually takes 5 min in order to process and continue. I cannot ask my user to wait 5 min to see the retrieved values from the list.

Can you share a bit of the code you use to make this happen, I mean the formulas or more of an example, it would be very useful.

Cheers,

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Roberto,

You only need a list workflow in the looked-up data list. This should not be updated as often as your main list, so th workflow would be used very rarely.

You only need to use the Update List Item action

 

You can use this in the following 2 ways:

1. Save your calculated or people column content directly to a Text column (which can be used in a form lookup):

2. You could just do the calculation inside the action, and save the value out to Text column.

In this example, I have concatenated other columns, with a hyphen between, to create a one column text value which can be used as filter:

You would need to set your list workflow to run on Create and Modify

.As stated above, this workflow is separate from your main form list, and is only run in the source (looked-up data) table. In my case, the table is used to lookup approvers, dependent on Business Unit, Country/Region, and their Role.

For lookups from forms to work they need one unique column in the source list to use as a filter- and this should be the column you save your calculation or copy of calculation result to.

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shaunlub‌ Thanks for your answer and sorry for the delay in my response. I actually solved it a simple look up and a JS button that takes me to edit mode. Thanks for your help anyway it was very educational.

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