Purging Workflows / SharePoint / Nintex

I'll encourage you to hit the blue Help button you see there to bring up the details you are looking for. Let me post a few things from the help document that can provide a few answers you are looking for.

You are on the Manage Workflow History Lists settings for a site.

The Manage workflow history lists provides the ability to create new SharePoint workflow history lists and enable existing SharePoint workflow history lists for use with Nintex Workflow within a team site.

A SharePoint workflow history list stores messages generated by a workflow.  Everything from approval activity (approve/reject), updates to a workflow, comments, cancellations and even workflow errors.

By default Nintex Workflow creates a SharePoint workflow history list that is enabled for Nintex Workflow. The enablement deploys event receivers into the list for workflow reporting. The standard SharePoint workflow history list cannot be used with workflows in Nintex. To use a standard SharePoint workflow history list it must first be enabled for Nintex Workflow.

Purge items from the workflow history lists

The Manage workflow history lists also provides the option to delete workflow history messages from the workflow history list on a site. This option is also available as an NWAdmin operation. This option can be used for maintenance on the history list to prevent the number of history items exceeding 2000 which can have performance implications. Deleting history messages does not affect the operation of a running workflow.

Check out the full article in the help guide for the full instructions on how to perform the purging actions

Purge Workflow Data

I wanted to point out that there are other purging methods beyond the history lists. You can also manage the Nintex Workflow Databases.

The Purge workflow data provides the option to delete historic data from the Nintex Workflow database. This option is also available as a NWAdmin operation. Reasons that data may need to be removed:

• Deleting old data to decrease the size of the Nintex Workflow content database(s).
• Deleting data added during testing of a workflow.
• Deleting data from lists that have been deleted.

Workflow data can be purged globally for the web farm, a specific site collection or individual sites.

So after you remove history list information, eventually you will also want to manage the databases. Especially if you only have one Nintex workflow content database and not multiples for your site collections.

Other important blogs you may be interested in: Demystifying Workflow History (Part 1)​ Defensive Workflow Design Part 1 - Workflow History Lists​ Database Capacity Planning: Nintex Workflow​ Database Mapping​

Yes, it should definitely be in the initial planning. I don't have the powershell scripts on me, but I did make a few for clients. You can run the NWAdmin commands right from a powershell shell, so it's simple to do. We created a windows scheduled task that ran the set interval we wanted, never more than once a month. If anything you would run it less often, maybe once in two months. The only real PowerShell I used was to fetch all of the site collections from a web app, then iterate through them so I can run the nwadmin commands reusing code.

Run these two commands

PurgeHistoryListData using the -lastActivityBefore and set the today to what you need. That way you have an expected date range. We kept the last 6 months, and the item count was always under 5000 on any lists. There are a lot of other switches for this command, check them out.

PurgeWorkflowData - make sure you use the purge history first. There is a side effect using this command, as you will no longer be able to have history list items associated with them purged using the ‘PurgeHistoryListData’ command unless the–clearall switch is used. This command also has a switch -lastActivityBeforeLocal

One other note, We found there were a few workflows generating a lot history that was necessary, but they were sharing the same history list. So we split them up to use different lists. This helped a lot.

I forgot to say that my habit is to disable history in production environment "Hide from workflow status" to avoid many history lines.