SharePoint Designer 2013 Workflows: Part 3 – Start another workflow

Do you want to start another workflow from your workflow? That tot using SharePoint Designer?Can you do that?

Answer is yes. Yes, you can start another workflow from your workflow using SharePoint Designer 2013.

You can find following actions under the group of ‘Coordination actions’.

Action text is “Start SharePoint 2010 workflow”. This clearly indicates that you can only start workflow created for platform type ‘SharePoint 2010 Workflow’.

While selecting the workflow you can only select workflow created for 2010 platform.

For using this action:

       1.      Create workflow for SharePoint 2010 platform.

2.      Create another workflow which will start previous workflow. This workflow need not to be 2010 workflow. Why this platform dependency is there? It is still a question to me and I am waiting for answer. May be I will be able to get it in MSDN documentation. Till then let’s move ahead and explore this feature. I will post updates as soon as I get more information.

3.      Add various stages as per your requirement.

4.      In stage having logic to start another workflow add ‘Start List Workflow’ action within required condition.

5.      Select workflow to be started.

       6.      Configure parameters.

7.      Select the item on which the workflow needs to be started.

8.      Check for errors, save and publish workflow.

Test your workflow. Similarly, you can start site workflow.

SharePoint Designer 2013 Workflows: Part 2 – Loop

Ever stuck at the question “How to implement loop in SharePoint Designer workflow?”

Most of us had this question and we found various workarounds for this.

All the workarounds were really painful. But thanks to SharePoint Designer product team. Now we have looping option available in SharePoint Designer 2013.

There are two options available.

·         Loop n times.

·         Loop with condition.

We can add multiple actions as loop content and these actions get executed till the looping condition is true.

Loop n Times

We can provide integer value for number of times the actions should get executed.

We can also set value using workflow lookup to any list/variable.

Loop with condition

This provides ‘While’ loop kind of functionality. Actions within loop get executed while given condition is true. For configuration of condition we have the flexibility of comparing values from any lists.

Enjoy looping in designer workflows!!

SharePoint Designer 2013 Workflows: Part 1 – Stage…a new step in revitalized SharePoint era

One of the cool new feature of SP 2013 workflows is ‘Stage’.

Stage is similar to step in SP 2010. It groups conditions and actions.

Conditions and actions are executed in order.

Step in SP 2010 also groups conditions and actions. It too executes conditions and actions in order. Then what is the difference between both.

Here is the interesting factor. The difference is new ‘Transition to Stage’ feature.

At the end of execution of condition and actions in a stage there is this block. In transition to stage section we can add condition and ‘Go-to’ action. Yes you are reading it right. Now we have ‘Go-to’ action. Many of us wanted this action while writing workflows with complex business rules. SharePoint Designer 2013 makes it very easy with ‘Go-to’ action.

This action gets visible in actions’ list when focus is in transition to stage section.

This action allows us to execute/navigate to particular stage or at the end of workflow.

Remember, transition section should not be empty.

Let’s take one real example here.

We have very common scenario:

Send email to user after every 10 days after item creation if status is ‘In Progress’.

Solution is very simple using SharePoint Designer 2013.

For this example I have created simple custom list with additional choice column named ‘Status’. It contains two choices In Progress and Complete.

1.      Create workflow for your list. Select platform type ‘SharePoint 2013 workflow’.

2.      Enable workflow to start when item is created.

3.      You will get ‘Text based designer view’ as follows.

4.      Rename stage appropriately. I renamed it to ‘First Stage’.

5.      Add log action to add some meaningful log.

6.      Add condition to check if status is ‘In Progress’.

7.      Add ‘Pause for Duration’ action and set duration as 10 days.

8.      In else condition add log with proper message.

9.      In transition to stage section again add condition to check status.

10.  In this condition add ‘Go-to’ action.

11.  You will get stages in workflow and additional ‘End of Workflow’ option in dropdown for go-to options.

12.  Select ‘First Stage’.

13.  In else condition add ‘Go-to’ action with selection as ‘End of Workflow’.

14.  Check for errors, save and publish workflow.

 Now your workflow is ready to test. Test workflow by adding item to your list and see the magic.

This ‘Stage’ feature with ‘Go-to’ action saved lot of complex logic in workflow and additional columns/lists to get similar functionality.

Liked this feature?

SharePoint Designer 2013: Introduction

Microsoft announced release of beta versions of their office products. This includes SharePoint Server 2013 and SharePoint Designer 2013. Through my blog I will try to focus on many new features in SharePoint Server 2013 and SharePoint Designer 2013. To start with I am writing a series of articles on SharePoint Designer 2013 workflows. In this article I will talk about changes in SharePoint Designer 2013.

First of all new designer looks very cool. It follows the Metro design similar to Office 2013.

SharePoint Designer 2013 will support both SP2010 and SP2013 sites.

One of the major change is SharePoint Designer 2013 will not support design view and split view for pages. In TechNet article Microsoft states that, “The design view technology is not as up-to-date as the current Internet Explorer. In addition, code view is much more widely used than design view. Design view cannot support the new tags in HTML5 and new cascading style sheets that are used in SharePoint 2013 Preview”.

For Workflow developers there are plenty of changes and exciting features added.

SharePoint workflows will now be hosted on new ‘Windows Azure Workflow (WAW)’ server. We can create farm of multiple WAW servers and connect SharePoint farm to it.

‘Stage’ is the new feature added to workflow similar to ‘Step’. We can add one or more ‘Step’ in to the ‘Stage’. But what is step? Answer is very interesting and really I liked ‘Stage’ very much. I am going to talk about it in next article.

One more feature is introduction of ‘Views’ in designer workflows. Now we can create/switch views of designer workflows.

Available views are Text based designer view, Visual Designer view and Stage view.

I will talk about them in my series of articles for SharePoint Designer 2013.

So stay tuned…