Error when setting a value for people or group field


Badge +9

I have a text field with a user's full name (John Smith) and a people or group field. When trying to set the people or group field to the text field value I am getting an error "The workflow could not update the item, possibly because one or more columns for the item require a different type of information."

I remember doing this in SharePoint Designer. Do I have to do anything special to make it work in Nintex Workflow?

Thanks!


11 replies

Badge +11

Hi Igor,

have you tried using another format of the name? Try "Smith, John" and also the login name like "domainSmithJ" or whatever it is like.

Cheers

Philipp

Badge +9

I will try that but it works for some and fails for others so I think it is not the format issue...

Badge +11

Maybe this display name is not set for all of your users?

Badge +4

You are trying to move the name in the text field column to the person or group column? 

SharePoint adds -1;#i:0#.w|  or something weird like that to usernames.  try appending  -1;#i:0#.w|[domain] before the username and see if that works?

Userlevel 5
Badge +14

have a look on people picker API https://community.nintex.com/docs/DOC-1222

and how to use add() function

Userlevel 5
Badge +14

the point is your should use user's login name for that purposes.

let me point out that in general user's display/full name (ie. your text string) IS NOT user's unique identifier, you might have several "John Smith"-es (or "Marian Hatala"-es happy.png) in your directory.

furthermore (you do not express it explicitly), if your text field is manually typed in by users, consider user mistakes, typos, swapping first and last name, etc...

but to the point, on the link I provided, there is depicted a principle how to do that and there is used user's login name to uniquely identify the user of interest.

it's not documented, however, in my tests it worked correctly even if I supplied user's display name (user's display name is label property in 'value' input parameter/object).

but as I mentioned above be aware of the fact that if you do not provide unique user's display name, you might get collection of users that satisfy your supplied criteria.

have a look on difference, when I supplied unique display name

and when I supplied non unique display name

note as well, the search by user's display name seems to look for substring, so you might be returned users you even not expected.

depends on your needs, it might or might not be acceptable for you.

Badge +4

This may be Jank but could you write to the item the WF is running on to convert the text name to the people picker column then use that to assign the flexi task?

Userlevel 5
Badge +14

I'm sorry, I haven't realized you look for solution in workflow.

in workflow it worked for me following way

- I created text variable and set it to my display name

- I created people or group variable and set it to text variable

- in flexi task I set assignees to people or group variable

when I ran workflow I got the task assigned.

Badge +9

Have you got the reply?

Badge +9

I had to bind the values from another list  to all the controls of the form depending upon the title field but people picker control's value didn't appear.I did the following work around

1)Created a new single line of text column

2)Split the username variable to remove the token part(i0#) and to fetch name

3)Bind that username variable to single line of text column

4)After submit trigger a workflow to update peoplepicker value with single line of text

5)Trigger a mail to "Peoplepicker" control value

Userlevel 5
Badge +14

what reply do you mean Ii should have got?

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