Design Question - Get the Version of item which was approved by the workflow.

S
Badge +8

Hello All,

This is more of a design question to ascertain if Nintex has this capability or have I overlooked any specific feature.

Consider List 1 (version history is enabled)

    1) User A makes changes sends it for approval to User B. User B approves. Workflow Ends

    2) User A again makes changes sends it for approval to User B(or User C does not matter), this User approves and workflow ends.

When I look at the history how do I know which version of the list item has B first approved? As for Audit perspective we should be able to know when User B approved the first time what were the contents of the listitem.

I believe is there a simple way in Nintex to achieve this? I do know that adding to much version also slows down the system, but my question is more on the design aspect rather than performance. I am sure I don't want to explicitly log all the details of the list item into another list when any user approves.. somehow breaks the purpose of versioning.

Am i missing something on a Tuesday morning? happy.png

One of my Client has chosen Nintex over other Workflow tools so want to be sure if this one feature could be a challenge?

Regards,

Shrini

5 replies

E
Userlevel 5
Badge +14

there is 'Version' item property. so you can write it to a history log or some audit trail

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S
Badge +8

Hi Marian,

Thanks very much for your reply, I am aware of the version property but was looking at some other ways of adding these details ... Workflow history also is a temporary location as it gets cleared off after a set period of time .. 

Regards,

Shrini

E
Userlevel 5
Badge +14

then you could add a dedicated field to the list where you could maintain kind of 'approval status'.

once a change/task is responded, you can update this column within workflow. such a change will create an entry in item's version history from which you could identify who/when/how responded to an approval.

S
Badge +8

Hi Marian,

Agreed, but this just means we have to work around the versioning of SP to attach it to Nintex. I was thinking of more on the principles of it as Nintex is a workflow engine it should probably just have easy integration with the SharePoint versions ..

Other than custom coding and filling all the gaps to give us the feature is there any other design best practise to work with versions of SharePoint or Nintex giving "Audit" information of which "fields"and what data it had approved?. I probably think this should be some OOB feature created for Nintex ..

Regards,

Shrini

E
Userlevel 5
Badge +14

as far as I know there is not anything like this available OOTB.

note single workflow instance can not be directly related to a single item version. while the workflow is running, item still may be updated (either by the workflow itself, other list or site workflows, users, webservices, etc)

you might need to track item version on workflow action level, but for long running actions (like tasks) this again need not be easy or reliable.

as well batching might play a role, since until an action gets really committed, some other changes might be applied.

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